BAGHDAD — Saudi Arabia drew condemnation from Iran and its allies in the region on Saturday after putting to death a prominent Shiite cleric who had criticized the government's treatment of its Shiite minority, in a mass execution of 47 men on terrorism-related charges.
Saudi officials said the mass execution, one of the largest in the kingdom in decades, was aimed at deterring those committed to violence against the state. But analysts said that the grouping of the cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, with hardened militants was a message to dissidents, and that it could exacerbate sectarian tensions across the Middle East.
The executions were the first of 2016 and followed a year in which at least 157 people were put to death, the conservative Muslim kingdom's highest yearly total in two decades.
They coincided with increased attacks on Saudi Arabia's Sunni monarchy by the jihadists of the Islamic State as well as with an escalating rivalry with Shiite Iran that has fueled conflicts in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. Many in the region saw the execution of Nimr as part of that rivalry, and Shiite leaders in different countries condemned the move. Nimr was an outspoken critic of the Saudi monarchy and was adopted as a symbolic leader by Shiite protesters in several Persian Gulf countries during the Arab Spring uprisings.
Most of those executed on Saturday had been convicted in connection with a wave of deadly attacks by al-Qaida in the kingdom about a decade ago, and the Saudi government had appeared in recent weeks to be paving the way for the executions.
Some Western analysts said that killing Nimr along with Qaida militants sought to conflate his activism with a grave national threat.
"This is indicative of the hard-line tilt the regime has taken," said Frederic Wehrey, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has spent time in Shiite parts of Saudi Arabia.
"To lump this guy with terrorists is a stretch," Wehrey said. "To my knowledge, he never called for armed insurrection."