Afghan Mob Destroys UN HQ Over Koran Burning
The New York Times reports:
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — Stirred up by a trio of angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters overran the compound of theUnited Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.
The dead included at least seven United Nations workers — five Nepalese guards and two Europeans, one of them a woman. None were Americans. Early reports, later denied by Afghan officials, said at least two of the dead had been beheaded.
The attack was the deadliest for the United Nations in Afghanistan since 11 people were killed in 2009, when Taliban suicide bombers invaded a guest house in Kabul, and it underscored the latent hostility toward the nine-year foreign presence here, even in a city long considered to be among the safest in Afghanistan — so safe that American troops no longer patrol here in any numbers.
Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, confirming the attack.
In Washington, President Obama issued a statement strongly condemning the violence against United Nations workers. “Their work is essential to building a stronger Afghanistan for the benefit of all its citizens,” he said. “We stress the importance of calm and urge all parties to reject violence.”
Afghanistan, deeply religious and reflexively volatile, has long been one of the most reactive flashpoints to perceived insults against Islam. When a Danish cartoonist lampooned the Prophet Mohammed, four people were killed in riots in Afghanistan within days in 2006. The year before, a one-paragraph item in Newsweek alleging that guards in Guantánamo had flushed a Koran down the toilet sparked three days of riots that cost 14 lives in Afghanistan.
Friday’s incident began when three mullahs, addressing worshipers at Friday prayers inside the Blue Mosque here, one of Afghanistan’s holiest places, urged people to take to the streets to agitate for the arrest of Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who oversaw the burning of a Koran on March 20. Otherwise, said the most prominent of them, Mullah Mohammed Shah Adeli, Afghanistan should cut off relations with the United States. “Burning the Koran is an insult to Islam and those who committed it should be punished,” he said.
A crowd of Afghans — some carrying signs reading “Down with America” and “Death to Obama” — poured into the streets and swelled — the governor of Balkh Province, Atta Mohammad Noor, later put the number at 20,000. According to Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, spokesman for Gen. Mohammad Daoud Daoud, the Afghan National Police commander for northern Afghanistan, the crowd soon overwhelmed the United Nations guards, disarming some and beating and shooting others.
Gen. Abdul Raouf Taj, the deputy police commander for Balkh Province, where Mazar is located, put the death toll at eight foreign United Nations staffers, but said there had not been any beheadings. “Police tried to stop them, but protesters began stoning the building and finally the situation got out of control,” General Taj said.
Mr. Ahmadzai, however, put the death toll at 10 foreigners in the United Nations compound, eight killed by gunshots and two of the victims beheaded.
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