FRANCE PRESS

RIYADH: A Saudi Shiite village where protesters clashed with police was calm Wednesday as a prominent cleric urged his followers to avoid the use of firearms and fingers of blame were pointed at Iran.

“The situation is calm now in the village” of Al-Awamiya in eastern Saudi Arabia, said Human Rights First Society head Ibrahim al-Mughaiteeb, after 14 people – including 11 policemen – were injured in rioting.
At a mosque in the village late Tuesday, Sheikh Nimr Nimr, appealed to fellow Shiites “not to respond to bullets with bullets,” according to the text of his sermon published online.

Saudi “authorities depend on bullets … and killing and imprisonment. We must depend on the roar of the word, on the words of justice,” Nimr said following two days of clashes between Shiite protesters and security forces.
But Mughaiteeb said “this is the first time” that protesters had used firearms rather than stones and Molotov cocktails.

A video posted on YouTube dated Oct. 4 showed a group of masked men clashing with police in one of the village’s streets as the sound of gunfire rang out.

Another video on the same website showed demonstrators chanting “Down with Mohammad bin Fahd,” the governor of the Eastern Province and son of Saudi Arabia’s former ruler, the late King Fahd.
The Interior Ministry of the predominantly Sunni Muslim kingdom blamed the unrest on a “foreign country,” in apparent reference to Shiite Iran across the Gulf.

Shiite activists in Arab states of the Gulf are regularly accused of links with their co-religionists in Iran.
“Iran is trying to export its problems to avenge what happened in Bahrain, and reduce pressures on Syria,” Tehran’s Arab ally, said Anwar Eshki, director of the Saudi-based Middle East Institute for Strategic Studies.

Iran is concerned about the possible collapse of the regime in Damascus, steering clear of condemning the bloodshed in Syria where the United Nations says 2,700 people have been killed amid mass protests since mid-March.

In Sunni-ruled Bahrain, authorities backed by Saudi-led Gulf troops in March crushed a protest led by the country’s Shiite majority. The crackdown soured relations between Iran and the Arab monarchies of the Gulf.

Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, referred to “concrete evidence of Iran’s involvement” in this week’s unrest, including “telephone calls from Tehran that were intercepted” by Saudi Arabia.

This is “a message from Iran to Gulf states after its failure in Syria and its loss of a strategic ally. It will respond … and we will begin to see escalation in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province,” he said.
The overwhelming majority of the estimated 2 million Saudi Shiites live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, neighboring Bahrain.
Security forces have been deployed and checkpoints set up in the Shiite-populated region since March, said Mughaiteeb.