Liz, a Shi’ite in her late 20s, is afraid to leave her house. She says that the last time she went out, government-hired thugs stopped her car at one of the many checkpoints that litter Manama, the capital of Bahrain. They pulled her out, asked for her identity card and tried to ascertain one thing: whether she was Sunni or Shi’ite.
“It’s pure racial profiling,” she says a few days later, sitting in her family’s living room in Al’Ali, a Shi’ite village north of Manama. “Your name could lead to your arrest if it’s a Shia name.” Her brother, an IT engineer, asks not to be named for fear of retribution. The last time he went out, thugs pulled him over, with his wife and child in the car. “They hauled me out, asked, ‘Are you Sunni or Shia?'” he says. “My dearest friend since childhood is a Sunni. Now he won’t even speak to me. He’s a former roommate, and now he treats me like a stranger.” Anytime he speaks to Sunnis now, he says, “it’s like there’s an invisible shield between us.”
