Lebanon Shiites ousted from Gulf as Hezbollah fans
▻http://news.yahoo.com/lebanon-shiites-ousted-gulf-hezbollah-fans-195205339.html
Like many Shiite Muslims working in the oil-rich Gulf state, Farhat says he popped up on the country’s deportation radar merely because of his sect, which its Sunni rulers associate with the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah.
“I felt like a criminal, but I did not know what I did wrong,” said Farhat, who had lived in the UAE for 15 years before his expulsion in May. “It seems that my only crime was that I am Shiite.”
Long considered by authorities as a security threat, hundreds of Shiites have been quietly expelled from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states on suspicion of being supporters of Hezbollah. The deportations have surged in recent months after the group publicly joined the civil war in Syria on the side of President Bashar Assad, an archenemy of the Gulf’s rulers.