Despite a series of abject apologies from the U.S. military and the Obama administration, fresh and growing protests were reported in at least two Afghan cities on Wednesday morning over the apparently unintentional burning of copies of the Qur’an at a U.S. military base.
Security officials said anti-U.S. demonstrations were taking place near a military base in Kabul and in the eastern city of Jalalabad. The Afghan Interior Ministry reported that at least seven people have been killed in the clashes.
The U.S. Embassy suspended travel in the capital, citing violent protests at the U.S. base, Camp Phoenix, “involving nearly 500 protestors burning tires and throwing rocks,” as well as near the university in the city’s west.
On Tuesday, after apologizing to “the noble people of Afghanistan” for the incident, International Security Assistance Force commander Gen. John Allen ordered all 130,000 coalition troops in the country to “complete training in the proper handling of religious materials” within the next fortnight.
The training, which must be completed by March 3, will include “the identification of religious materials, their significance, correct handling and storage,” the NATO-led ISAF said in a statement.
“I’m going to take steps inside these headquarters to issue an order today on how we will handle religious materials for the faith of Islam, henceforth, by ISAF, so that something like this just cannot happen again,” Allen said in an interview on NATO’s television channel earlier in the day.
An Afghan protester gestures towards an American soldier at the U.S. base at Bagram during an anti-U.S. demonstration on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)
The directive followed the discovery Monday night that religious materials including copies of the Qur’an had been taken, with garbage, from a military detention center to a nearby incineration facility at the U.S. base in Bagram, some 40 miles north of Kabul.
Afghan government officials were quoted as saying Afghans workers had noticed the material and stopped the burning, but not before some of the books had been damaged.
Military officials told the Associated Press that Qur’ans had been removed from a library at the detention center because they were evidently being used by Afghan detainees to disseminate “extremist” messages.
As thousands of Afghans angered by news of the incident protested at Bagram, the military and administration offered several public apologies:
--In a statement published on the ISAF and U.S. military Web sites, sent to Afghan television networks and posted on YouTube, Allen offered his “sincere apologies for any offense this may have caused, to the president of Afghanistan, the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and most importantly, to the noble people of Afghanistan.”
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