Days after a deadly crackdown had cleared the square, demonstrators streamed back into Pearl Roundabout demanding political reform and the release of prisoners. The reoccupation marked a tense, temporary victory for Bahrain's protest movement before a Saudi-led intervention in March crushed the uprising and the monument itself was later demolished.
Bahrain's protests had begun on February 14, inspired by uprisings already toppling governments in Tunisia and Egypt, and were met with lethal force. A pre-dawn raid on February 17 killed several sleeping protesters in the roundabout, an event demonstrators bitterly nicknamed their own "Bloody Thursday."
When the army unexpectedly withdrew its armored vehicles a few days later, crowds surged back into the traffic circle beneath its distinctive pearl-shaped monument, a symbol of Bahrain's pearl-diving heritage that protesters had adopted as the emblem of their movement. For a brief window it felt like the government was buckling, with crowds larger than before and calls growing from reform to outright abdication of the ruling Al Khalifa family.
The reprieve did not last. In March, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sent troops across the causeway under a Gulf Cooperation Council mandate, martial law was declared, and the crackdown that followed included mass arrests, trials of medics who had treated wounded protesters, and the bulldozing of the Pearl Monument itself, erasing the physical symbol of the uprising from Manama's skyline.