Skirts above the knees, uncovered hair, Western-style evening wear, open-toed sandals, and party makeup. Just a few kilometers to the north, on the other side of the King Fahd Bridge, these Saudi girls would risk going to jail for wearing such attire in their country. However, they have just changed clothes at their hotel in Bahrain and are ready to enjoy the night.
Their first stop is one of the city's most well-known liquor stores. It is a huge establishment with no windows facing the street, where young and older adults of various nationalities line up to get bags filled with beer, whiskey, vodka, or rum from brands unfamiliar to Westerners, mostly from China. Two long lines form at the cash registers. The smell of condensed humanity lingers in the air. They carry their purchases in black bags so that no one can see what they have when they leave the store, although everyone already knows. Despite the recent Iranian bombings and the decline in tourism, Bahrain's nightlife remains the main social escape. It's the opportunity for behaviors and spaces that are restricted in their own country, such as attending rock concerts or spending the day with friends riding jet skis.
In a nearby parking lot, Qatari and Saudi men dressed in their white disdashas park their luxury cars in search of entertainment. The weekend begins for the two types of tourism that cross the border to this libertine island: the family-oriented, looking for hotels with pools and terrace restaurants (as it's not too hot yet), and the young people who find in Bahrain everything their government prohibits. They number tens of thousands every weekend.
At McGettigan's, a kind of Irish pub with screens showing football matches, one can see the economic damage that this small Gulf country has suffered from the bombings by the Tehran regime. "Before the war, it was very difficult to find a place here and move around. Now it's almost empty," says a Spanish resident in Bahrain for years. A quick glance reveals the aim of this weekend tourism. Several Arab men enjoy a beer alone or accompanied by Eastern or African women. Others wait alone, hoping to catch the eye of newcomers. Our Spanish contact is not surprised.
"What do you think? It's always like this. Saudis come for that; then on Sunday, they return to their country as if committing sins beyond the bridge doesn't count."
We change bars. In another bar, we find more workers than clients. Among them, there is everything: from those who provide services voluntarily, linked to labor migration phenomena, to those who owe debts to some trafficking mafia. We ask a Nigerian woman about her journey to get here: "I incurred a huge debt with a mafia that cost me a lot to pay off. Now I am finally free and trying to make money on my own."
"Do you like being here in Bahrain?"
"It is true that it is a good place to make money, but I don't like sleeping with Saudis. They treat us very badly. They do things to us that they would never do to Arab women. They have a serious racism problem."
In the Juffair neighborhood, one finds neon signs more typical of downtown Bangkok, advertising all kinds of massages with Thai women. Around us, in the bar, women gather by nationalities as Saudis and Qataris arrive. Filipino waitresses take orders and serve drinks. A young man who looks like a teenager jokes with three of them while drinking a pitcher of beer and smoking one cigarette after another. International reports and the UN point out that some women from Thailand arrive with visas as "artists" or leisure workers and end up sometimes deceived about the actual conditions.
A local taxi driver explains that lenocinium in Bahrain is prohibited by law, but there is a large industry operating in a gray area where the government does not want to intervene, knowing that this lucrative weekend tourism would stop crossing the bridge. "There are clubs where women from Eastern Europe move, others for Asians; there are also places where Africans go," he tells us. At this moment, with international tourism no longer arriving due to the war with Iran, this underground economy of nighttime alcohol is seen in the country as a lifeline.
U.S. Marines, Keeping a Low Profile
Close by is the U.S. Fifth Fleet base, and we wonder if such a strong military presence also attracts courtesans to this place. "The Americans have been keeping a low profile for a while. They live in hotels to stay away from their bases, which have been attacked by Iran, and then those hotels have also been bombed, especially those in the Seef area," our contact tells us. "During the most violent attack days, you couldn't go near any place linked to the US Navy because it was systematically targeted. Iran has spies here who have pinpointed targets with great precision," he says. "Now you see Navy SEALs dressed casually as if people don't know who they are," says the waiter at one of the most well-known restaurants in Manama.
Today, the warships are no longer there, scattered across the Persian Gulf to avoid offering Iranians such an obvious target, but the total toll of destruction caused by Tehran's missiles and drones is much greater than acknowledged by the White House. A recent CNN report states that many U.S. bases in the Middle East have been so destroyed that they are uninhabitable.
The war with Iran has also reignited, albeit in a contained manner, sectarian tensions in Bahrain, a country where the Shiite majority coexists under a Sunni monarchy. The conflict has reinforced the official narrative linking any Shiite mobilization with Iranian influence, leading to increased surveillance, controls, and repression on figures and communities deemed sensitive, such as the neighborhoods where this majority lives, which, by the way, have not been targeted by Tehran.
At the same time, within the Shiite population, there is a latent discontent, more about political and social issues than religious ones, which tends to become more visible in times of crisis, although it rarely translates into open protests due to strong state control. A well-educated Shiite will never earn as much as a Sunni with the same qualifications or have the same opportunities. The result is a tense balance: there is no immediate explosion, but there is a silent polarization in which external war acts as an amplifier of internal fractures that have never disappeared since 2011.
As tensions rise, what crosses the King Fahd Bridge are not caravans of young partygoers and alcohol enthusiasts, but Saudi tanks. Riyadh is keen on preventing Bahrain from spiraling out of control and does everything possible to avoid it falling into the hands of a majority that may sympathize with Tehran, and it maintains this control with an iron fist.
In March 2011, during the Arab Spring uprising in Bahrain, the authorities demolished the iconic Pearl Monument, which had become the main gathering point for protesters. The structure was torn down after the entry of security forces and Gulf troops, in an operation aimed at physically erasing the epicenter of the protest and preventing it from becoming a mobilization site again.
Sunday brings traffic jams on the bridge, but in the opposite direction. From this monumental work, one can see in the distance the oil tankers lighting up in the Persian Gulf and the flames of the wells reflecting in the sea at dusk. The flow of crude has stopped, but everything else continues to function. Our contact shows us one of the most lavish mosques in downtown Manama. Of course, it is Sunni. "We are screwed. That's the summary I can give." The consequences of this war will be seen in a year, but they will be terrible.