Kayhan Int’l Political Desk
    
  As the annual Hajj pilgrimage is about to start in Hijaz, the Land of Divine Revelation, its occupiers since 1925 who masquerade as ‘Guardians of the Two Holy Shrines’ in order to deceive the Muslim World, are carrying out genocide in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula on the Persian Gulf coast.
      Their victims this time – after how brutally they had crushed the peaceful demands for restoration of birthrights of the people of Bahrain in 2012, and amid their blasting to bits of the people and infrastructure of Yemen for the past two-and-a-half years, in addition to their destabilization of Syria and Iraq through the cannibalistic Takfiri terrorists – are the local Shi’a Arab Muslims, whose oil-rich lands they continue to illegally occupy and whose stolen wealth they squander on pleasures, luxuries, purchase of ‘beautiful’ weapons, tribute to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to godfather US, and fanning of sedition throughout the Muslim World.
      Reports coming from the southern shores of the Persian Gulf and pictures leaked, show the historic town of Awamiya in the Qatif region, especially the 400-year old al-Mosawara neighborhood, reduced to rubble, with the few buildings left standing riddled with bullets and artillery shells.
      Moreover, video clips are circulating of Saudi soldiers blasphemously stomping with their jackboots on religious posters and verses from the holy texts, as part of their wild celebrations at having massacred unarmed men, women and children.
      Observers were quick to note that 27 years ago in 1990, similar was the scene when soldiers of the heretical Wahhabi regime bulldozed the ancient Hashemite quarters in the holy city of Medina where Shi’a Muslims and descendants of Prophet Muhammad (SAWA) had been peacefully living for the past millennium and four centuries, opposite the Masjid an-Nabi and near to the dilapidated Sacred Jannat al-Baqi Cemetery – so blasphemously destroyed in 1925 by the desert brigand of Najdm Abdul-Aziz Aal-e Saud.
      As a reward for his crimes against Islam, Abdul-Aziz was bestowed by his masters in London the spurious entity called Saudi Arabia in 1932, exactly 16 years before Britain was to plant the illegal Zionist entity in the heart of Palestine by settling there tens of thousands of East European Jews – distant cousins of the Aal-e Saud.
     Now coming back to the ongoing genocide in Awamiya, the 40-square km town of 30,000 inhabitants that has been classified by the UNESCO as a unique heritage, has suffered a tragic fate. Saudi bulldozers, RPGs and all kinds of destructive weapons have been used for the past three months to destroy it and dislocate its inhabitants.
     The irony is that the UN had turned a blind eye to the destruction of the heritage of humanity and the genocide of the Shi’a Muslims of Arabia, whose only fault is that Awamiyah was the hometown of late Martyr Ayatollah Sheikh Nimr Baqer an-Nimr, the respected religious scholar whom the heretical Wahhabi regime beheaded in January 2016 after he spoke against injustice of the Aal-e Saud occupiers of the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
      In 2011, when the Islamic uprising was sweeping North Africa and Arab West Asia, the scholar Sheikh Nimr had repeatedly called for a nonviolent uprising for restoration of the birthrights of the local people. A year later he was arrested and accused of sectarian strife, sedition and similar absurd charges.
      Shi’a Muslims account for over 20 percent of the population of Saudi Arabia and are twice the number of the ruling Wahhabi minority – mostly made up of political Wahhabis rather than Wahhabis by conviction – yet they are treated as second or third class citizens, with no share in the oil-wealth of their own ancestral homeland, and with jobs barred from them in the oil, defence, security, and various other sectors. They cannot even public practice the tenets of their faith.
     Yet the world is silent on their plight. At the same time, the quixotic US president, Donald Trump, who shamelessly dances with the despotic devils and calls for change of democratically elected governments of countries that attach importance to public opinion, is busy kicking up crises all over the globe and wrongly targeting the Islamic Republic of Iran where religious and ethnic minorities are guaranteed all basic civil liberties, with quotas for them in the elected parliament.
      Currently, the Saudi regime has sentenced to death 14 Shi’a Muslim youths of the eastern parts on trumped up charges of terrorism and under these circumstances isn’t it treason to regard Riyadh as ‘father-figure’ for the region as some naïve and knavish politicians are saying.
      Take the case of Mujtaba as-Sowaiket, who is among the 14 hapless youths on whose innocent necks the sword of the Saudis dangles. Five years ago, as a 17-year old, he was about to board at Dammam airport a flight to the US, where he was to start university, when the regime prevented his departure.
     This is only the tip of the iceberg of the crimes against humanity of regime in Riyadh. As one prominent Iraqi political figure had said a couple of years earlier, the region will only see peace with the disintegration of Saudi Arabia.