Anti-American Protests Spread Through Middle East
September 13, 2012
Anti-Amercian protests have spread across the Middle East and North Africa, in the wake of the violent anti-U.S. demonstrations in Egypt and Libya on September 11. Today in Yemen, demonstrators stormed the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, the capital, and burned the American flag before being driven back by security forces. In Egypt, protests erupted for a third day outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, where at least 70 people were injured in scuffles with police. In Iran’s capital, Tehran, crowds chanting anti-American and anti-Israel slogans demonstrated outside the Swiss embassy, which handles U.S. interests in the absence of formal diplomatic relations with Washington. (The United States has not maintained diplomatic relations with the Iranian government since revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held a group of Americans, primarily embassy employees, as hostages.) Protesters also staged demonstrations in Iraq, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia. In Afghanistan, officials have reportedly suppressed Internet access to prevent users from viewing the offending video online to forestall public unrest.
The Middle East and North Africa (World Book map)
The United States ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed on September 11 in an attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and the other victims died as rioters attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire. In Cairo on September 11, an angry mob scaled the wall of the U.S. embassy and pulled down and burned the American flag. The violence in both Libya and Egypt was initially linked to a highly inflammatory, anti-Islamic film.
The film, Innocence of Muslims, was reportedly written and produced by an anti-Muslin filmmaker, possibly of foreign extraction, living in California. A 14-minute trailer for the film was posted on the video-sharing website YouTube. However, U.S. officials are investigating whether the attack in Libya was triggered by the inflammatory film or whether it was pre-planned by some terrorist organization to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Additional World Book articles:
- Diplomatic corp
- Foreign Service
- Iran 1979 (a Back in Time article)
- The Middle East: From Fall to Spring (a special report)
