Egyptian protesters threw stones at riot police officers during clashes near Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo on Friday.
Anti-
American rage that began this week over a video insult to Islam
spread to nearly 20 countries across the
Middle East and beyond on
Friday, with violent and sometimes deadly protests that convulsed the
birthplaces of the
Arab Spring revolutions, breached two more
United
States Embassies and targeted diplomatic properties of Germany and
Britain.
The broadening of the protests appeared to reflect a pent-up resentment
of
Western powers in general, and defied pleas for restraint from world
leaders, including the new Islamist president of
Egypt,
Mohamed Morsi, whose country was the instigator of the demonstrations
that erupted three days earlier on the anniversary of the
Sept. 11,
2001, attacks.
The anger stretched from North Africa to South Asia and Indonesia and in
some cases was surprisingly destructive. In Tunis, an American-run
school that was untouched during the revolution nearly two years ago was
completely ransacked. In eastern Afghanistan, protesters burned an
effigy of President Obama, who had made an outreach to Muslims
a thematic pillar of his first year in office.
The State Department confirmed that protesters had penetrated the
perimeters of the American Embassies in the Tunisian and Sudanese
capitals, and said that 65 embassies or consulates around the world had
issued emergency messages about threats of violence, and that those
facilities in Islamic countries were curtailing diplomatic activity. The
Pentagon said it sent Marines to protect embassies in Yemen and Sudan.
The wave of unrest not only increased concern in the West but raised new
questions about political instability in Egypt, Tunisia and other
Middle East countries where newfound freedoms, once suppressed by
autocratic leaders, have given way to an absence of authority. The
protests also seemed to highlight the unintended consequences of
America’s support of movements to overthrow those autocrats, which have
empowered Islamist groups that remain implacably hostile to the West.
“We have, throughout the
Arab world, a young, unemployed, alienated and
radicalized group of people, mainly men, who have found a vehicle to
express themselves,”
Rob Malley, the Middle East-North African program
director for the
International Crisis Group, a consulting firm, said in a
telephone interview from
Tripoli, Libya.
In a number of these countries, particularly Egypt and Tunisia, he said,
“the state has lost a lot of its capacity to govern effectively.
Paradoxically, that has made it more likely that events like the video
will make people take to the streets and act in the way they did.
Some of the most serious violence targeted the compound housing the
German and British Embassies in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, causing
minor damage to the British property but major fire damage to the German
one. The foreign ministers of both countries strongly protested the
assault, which The Associated Press said had been instigated by a
prominent sheik exhorting protesters to storm the German Embassy to
avenge what he called anti-Muslim graffiti on Berlin mosques.
The police fired tear gas to repulse attacks in Khartoum, where about
5,000 demonstrators had massed, news reports said, before they moved on
to the United States Embassy on the outskirts of the capital.
In Tunis, the United States Embassy was assaulted at midday by
protesters who smashed windows and set fires before security forces
routed them in violent clashes that left at least 3 dead and 28 hurt.
Witnesses and officials said no Americans were hurt and most had left
earlier.
The worst damage was inflicted on the
American Cooperative School of
Tunis, a highly regarded institution that, despite its name, catered
mostly to the children of non-American expatriates, nearly half of whom
work for the African Development Bank. School officials, who had sent
the 650 students home early, said a few protesters scaled the fence and
dismantled monitoring cameras, followed by 300 to 400 others, some of
them local residents, who looted everything including 700 laptop
computers, musical instruments and the safe in the director’s office,
and then set the building on fire.
“It’s ransacked,” the director, Allan Bredy, said in a telephone
interview. “We were thinking it was something the Tunisia government
would keep under control. We had no idea they would allow things to go
as wildly as they did.”
The school’s director of security, David Santiago, said a group of staff
members formed a posse armed with baseball bats to chase lingering
looters away hours after the assault. “Our elementary school library is
burning as we speak,” he said angrily as he and his colleagues sought to
assess the damage. “It’s complete chaos.
Thousands of
Palestinians
joined demonstrations after Friday Prayer in the Gaza Strip. Since
there is no American diplomatic representation in Gaza, the main
gathering took place in
Gaza City, outside the Parliament building,
where American and Israeli flags were placed on the ground for the
crowds to stomp. Palestinians also clashed with Israeli security forces
in Jerusalem and held protests in the West Bank.
Witnesses in Cairo said protests that first flared Tuesday grew in scope
on Friday, with demonstrators throwing rocks and gasoline bombs near
the American Embassy and the police firing tear gas. The Egyptian news
media said more than 220 people had been injured in clashes so far.
In the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, where J. Christopher Stevens,
the American ambassador, and three other Americans were killed Tuesday,
militias fired rockets at what they thought were American drones
overhead, prompting the government to temporarily close the airport as a
precaution. The bodies of Mr. Stevens and the others killed in the
Libya attack were returned to the United States on Friday.
In Lebanon, where Pope Benedict XVI was visiting, one person was killed
and 25 were injured as protesters attacked restaurants. There was also
turmoil in Yemen, Bangladesh, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, India, Pakistan
and Iraq, and demonstrations in Malaysia. In Nigeria, troops fired into
the air to disperse protesters marching on the city of Jos, Reuters
reported. In Syria, about 200 protesters chanted anti-American slogans
outside the long-closed American Embassy in Damascus, news reports said.
In the Egyptian Sinai, a group of Bedouins stormed an international
peacekeepers’ camp and set fire to an observation tower, according to Al
Ahram Online, a state-owned, English-language Web site. Three people,
two Colombians and one Egyptian, were injured in the ensuing clashes.
In Yemen, baton-wielding security forces backed by water cannons blocked
streets near the American Embassy a day after protesters breached the
outer security perimeter there, and officials said two people were
killed in clashes with the police. Still, a group of several dozen
protesters gathered near the diplomatic post, carrying placards and
shouting slogans.
In Iraq, where the heavily fortified American Embassy sits on the banks
of the Tigris River inside Baghdad’s Green Zone and is out of reach to
most Iraqis, thousands protested after Friday Prayer in Sunni and Shiite
cities alike.
Raising banners with Islamic slogans and denouncing the United States
and Israel, Iraqis called for the expulsion of American diplomats from
the country and demanded that the American government apologize for the
incendiary film and take legal action against its creators.
In Egypt, in particular, leaders scrambled to repair deep strains with
Washington provoked by their initial response to attacks on the American
Embassy on Tuesday, tacitly acknowledging that they erred in their
response by focusing far more on anti-American domestic opinion than on
condemning the violence.
The attacks squeezed Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood between
conflicting pressures from Washington and their Islamic constituency at
home, a senior Brotherhood official acknowledged. During a 20-minute
phone call Wednesday night, Mr. Obama warned Mr. Morsi that relations
would be jeopardized if the authorities in Cairo failed to protect
American diplomats and stand more firmly against anti-American attacks
On Friday, Mr. Morsi, on a scheduled state visit to Rome, called attacks on foreign embassies “absolutely unacceptable.”
By
RICK GLADSTONE
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