Iran recalls ambassador from Bahrain over protests

Iran has recalled its ambassador from Bahrain in protest against the killing of Shi'ite Muslim demonstrators in the island state, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported on Wednesday.

State TV said the ambassador had been recalled for consultations, in what would appear to be a tit-for-tat move after Bahrain which withdrew its ambassador from Tehran for consultations on Tuesday to protest at Tehran's criticisms.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday criticized Bahrain's crackdown on protesters and told Saudi Arabia its military deployment was a threat to regional security.

Raising its rhetoric against the suppression of Bahrain's Shi'ite Muslim majority, Iran, the main Shi'ite power in the Gulf, said the crisis could lead to wider conflict - something analysts have warned is a real risk due to regional rivalries and sectarian tensions.

"Today, we witness the degree of pressure imposed on the majority of people in Bahrain and [they] use rifles and cannon ... What has happened is bad, unjustifiable and irreparable," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on state television.

Bahraini forces, backed by helicopters, fired tear gas in a crackdown on protesters on Wednesday. The crackdown cleared hundreds from a camp that had become the symbol of an uprising by the island's Shi'ite Muslim majority, and left at least six people dead.

About 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain on Monday as part of an effort by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to help the government cope with the protests -- a move Tehran said was conceived by its long-time foe, the United States.

The Pentagon has said it was not given any advance notice that Saudi or other regional forces would deploy to Bahrain.

Tehran has voiced support for a wave of uprisings throughout the region -- which it has characterized as an "Islamic awakening" -- while it faces down attempts by Iranian opposition to revive protests that were crushed in the months following Ahmadinejad's contested 2009 re-election.

Iranian authorities have deployed large numbers of security forces to prevent any repeat of those mass protests.

Fires

Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said of the Saudi deployment: "These kinds of acts will increase tension and disrupt the stability and security of the region."

"In the event that these kinds of unstudied and illegal acts become routine, then the region will be the centre of fire, animosity and conflict," he was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency.

No one in the Iranian government has suggested taking any military action, but one member of parliament told Fars that Saudi should "take it for granted that Tehran will use all its capabilities to prevent the suppression of the Bahraini people".

"If the Saudis' fires in Bahrain are not put out, Tehran, in order to sustain the stability of the region, will promptly swing into action and suffocate the aggressive countries," Hossein Naqavi, a member of parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, told Fars.

Although the Saudi troops entered Bahrain at the invitation of the government, the move has been portrayed in Iran as akin to a military incursion.

Ahmadinejad compared the Saudi deployment to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 under Saddam Hussein who went from enjoying U.S. support in the 1980s to become its enemy and was ultimately ousted by a U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

"In the past, there were also some countries that sent their troops to neighboring countries, where are they now? It is good if they learn a lesson from Saddam's fate," he said.

Analysts have said the Saudi troop movement into Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, is a mark of concern in Saudi Arabia that concessions by the country's monarchy could inspire the conservative Sunni kingdom's own Shi'ite minority.