Middle East: Protests Spread over Islamophobic “Innocence of Muslims” Film

As more people around the world have seen the Islamophobic film, Innocence of Muslims, the anti-US anger appears to have evolved into anti-Western anger as the embassies of the UK and Germany were attacked by protesters in Khartoum, Sudan.

The German embassy was reportedly attacked first, with protesters setting fire to a section of the compound (as seen in the photograph to the left), before moving on the the British embassy next door. Neither the UK nor Germany have any link to the film which has sparked the anger or any of its producers or actors, but appear to have become targets as powerful Western nations. Protesters are reported to have now breached the walls of the US embassy in Khartoum with gunfire heard from inside.

Elsewhere, in Cairo the police have used tear gas to push back around 500 protesters from the US embassy, a location stormed by protesters on Tuesday. The streets nearby have also been blocked with barbed wire, concrete barricades, and police vehicles. The President of Egypt, Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, has vowed to organise marches against the film outside mosques in the country, but is determined to maintain the safety and security of foreign diplomats on Egyptian soil.

In Tunisia, protesters have breached the walls of the US Embassy compound in Tunis, with windows smashed and trees set alight. At least five protesters have been wounded and there is reportedly a large fire now blazing within the compound. Protestors have also set fire to the American school in Tunis.

In Tripoli in northern Lebanon there has been clashes between police and protesters, with a KFC fast food outlet having been set ablaze as you can see in the photograph on the right. The demonstrations do not appear to have yet spread to the capital, Beirut.

Protests have also been held outside the US embassies this week in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, Bangladesh, Israel, and most notably Libya where the US ambassador and three US embassy staff were killed. Most follow similar patterns of burning US flags and chanting anti-US slogans such as “Obama, we are all Osama”, “Listen, listen Obama, all of the nation is Osama”, or the Islamist chants of “There is no god but God and Mohamed is his prophet”.

In response to the protests, US antiterrorism units are reportedly being deployed in in Egypt and Yemen, with further intervention possible as the situation escalates across the region.