As my colleagues Enayat Najafizada and Rod Nordland report, thousands of protesters, enraged by the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, overran a United Nations compound in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Friday, killing at least 12 people.
The incident that so enraged Afghans, the burning of a Koran after a mock trial in a small Florida church on March 20, was barely noticed in the United States but widely reported in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The presidents of both countries have called on the United States to arrest Terry Jones, the pastor of the church.
Mr. Jones presided over the “International Judge the Koran Day” event, after which one copy of the Muslim holy book was “executed,” on camera, before 30 congregants. Britain’s Channel 4 News reported that the Web video of the burning Koran was shown on television in Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent days.
Feelings were running so high in Pakistan last week that condemnation of the Koran burning by a State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, was broadcast on Pakistani television:
Earlier this week, a Pakistani news agency reported that Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, “said Pakistan has taken up the recent desecration of the Holy Koran by lunatic priest Terry Jones with Interpol.” Apparently not realizing that Mr. Jones is not a Roman Catholic priest, Mr. Malik reportedly asked Interpol “to take up the matter with [the] Pope,” arguing that “the priest must be treated as terrorist as he was fanning religious hatred.”
This raw video of the chaotic scenes after Friday Prayers in Mazar-i-Sharif, showing protesters at the compound and shots being fired in the air by the security forces, was posted online by Tolo TV, an Afghan television station that reportedly broadcast video of the Koran burning in recent days:
More raw video, posted online by Britain’s Channel 4 News, appears to show Afghan victims of the violence being carried from the scene by anguished friends and relatives.
A colleague in Afghanistan explains that the second clip includes video of a man crying for his brother, shouts of “Death to America,” and men swearing: “we will fight the infidels” and “we will take Americans out of our soil.”
After images of a man smashing a gun against the pavement, the video ends with an interview with a man in a white cap who seemed to blame the local security forces for the descent into violence. He said:
We had a peaceful protest. We went to the UNAMA gate. We took three weapons from the people there; we took out the magazines from them, took all the bullets out and threw them away in order to prevent violence. … But these cowards – wild, internal enemies of our country – shot and killed or injured 10 or 12 of our own people. … I saw four people with my own eyes: two of them had died and two others were injured.