Perspective: Bahrain's majority Shiites demanding changes from Sunni kingdom

The island kingdom is home to great wealth, with projects such as the Bahrain Financial Harbor, scheduled for completion next year

SITRA, Bahrain - Like most Shiite Muslim villages in this wealthy Gulf kingdom, Sitra is hidden away from the glitzy shopping malls, the steel-and-glass skyscrapers, the six-lane highways and luxury seaside hotels.

Less than three miles outside Manama, the booming capital, Sitra is dusty and poor. Many of its homes are shoddily built. The streets are dimly lit at night and some are unpaved.

Young men in cheap tracksuits idly gather on street corners. Hardly a wall in the village is without anti-government graffiti or images of Shiites killed in years of anti-government protests.

The disparity between the country's affluent areas and Shiite villages such as Sitra lies at the heart of a potentially bloody conflict in this tiny island nation where a Shiite majority is ruled by a Sunni Muslim establishment.

Many fear that any unrest in Bahrain - held up by the U.S. as a paragon of democratic reforms - could spill across the Persian Gulf, including to Saudi Arabia whose Shiite minority of some 15 percent is centered in the country's east, where its oil fields lie.

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