[Proper
treatment of the Koran is a highly sensitive issue for Muslims across the
world, including in Afghanistan, where international troops are fighting to
defeat the militantly Islamist Taliban in a war that has entered its 11th year.
Experts in Islam say copies of the Koran should be buried or
released in flowing waters if they need to be disposed of, but religious
leaders in Afghanistan said Tuesday that local practice is not to dispose of
the texts at all.]
By Kevin Sieff
BAGRAM, Afghanistan — As thousands of angry
Afghans flung rocks at NATO’s largest military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday,
American officials sought to quell a widening furor over what they said was the
accidental incineration by U.S. military personnel of copies of the Islamic
holy book.
The protests
erupted early Tuesday, after Afghans working at Bagram air base told local
residents that a number of copies of the Koran had been burned. When they
carried out the charred pages, waving them in the air, the crowd grew larger
and more defiant.
Among those chanting “long live Islam” and “death to America” were some of the 5,000 Afghans who have worked inside the base for years. Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was quick to express contrition for the incident, which officials worried could incite violence across the country.
U.S. officials
said the books were mistakenly sent with a pile of trash for disposal before
several Afghans identified them. Although the initial protests were
concentrated largely around the Bagram base, some of the charred Koran remains
were sent promptly to Kabul, where President Hamid Karzai and other top Afghan
officials will decide how to respond to the incident.
“These people
must be punished,” said Qari Ghulam Mustafa, a top religious official from
Parwan province, where Bagram is located. He carried a stack of 10 blackened
Korans on his lap as he and others traveled to the capital in a white
hatchback. He said nearly 100 more publications were damaged.
“If the
Americans ever deny that they did this, we will show them these pages,” said
Mullah Abdul Rahim Shah Agha, the head of the Parwan ulema council, or Muslim
clerical body.
The apologies
from Allen and top Obama administration officials were among the most profuse
of the decade-long war. But there was no immediate indication that they would
calm the kind of unrest that has turned explosive in the past, notably in
April, when deadly protests broke out over a case of Koran-burning in Florida.
“When we
learned of these actions, we immediately intervened and stopped them,” Allen
said in a statement. “We are taking steps to ensure
this does not ever happen again. I assure you . . . I promise you . . . this was NOT intentional
in any way.”
The United
States faces an enormous challenge in withdrawing its troops over the next two
years while attempting to protect hard-won gains and facilitate a delicate
peace process between the Afghan government and Taliban insurgents. With so
little margin for error, the incident Tuesday could threaten the relationship
on which U.S. military and diplomatic strategies depend.
U.S. and
Afghan officials expressed concerns about the prospect of more violent reaction
in coming days.
The U.S.
Embassy in Kabul warned American citizens, “Past demonstrations in Afghanistan
have escalated into violent attacks on Western targets of opportunity.”
The incident
also could complicate relations between NATO forces and those Afghans who
perform a variety of non-military functions on bases. The hundreds of Bagram
employees who were among the protesters will have to decide whether to leave
their jobs or continue working while disguising their antipathy.
“The people
who do this are our enemies,” said a 27-year-old who has worked at a warehouse
on the base for two years. “How could I ever work for them again?”
Another Bagram
employee who joined the protest said, “Whoever goes back to work will be
killed. They’ll think of us as traitors.” The workers declined to give their
names for fear of reprisals.
More than
3,000 people were involved in the protests Tuesday. Afghan and Western security
forces blocked roads leading to the base and instructed local employees to stay
home. But when they heard about the incident, the workers arrived at the base’s
front gate in droves.
Rumors about
the incident — and American motives — circulated through the crowd. In Kabul,
35 miles to the south, even top Afghan officials struggled to understand what
had happened.
Gen. Ahmad
Amin Naseeb, director of the Afghan army’s religious and cultural affairs
department, said he had been told “that the international troops have burned
and thrown copies of the Koran into the dustbins.”
In his second
statement of the day, Allen announced that all NATO forces in Afghanistan would
complete training in the proper handling of religious materials by March 3.
NATO said
religious materials, including Korans “identified for disposal,” were collected
at the Parwan Detention Facility, a prison next to the base, and “were
inadvertently taken to an incineration facility at Bagram airfield” Monday
night.
A Western
military official said several hundred Islamic publications, including Korans,
were removed from the prison library because some had extremist content and
others contained radical messages that detainees were writing to one another,
the Associated Press reported. The official, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, said that the texts were charred but that none were destroyed.
Proper
treatment of the Koran is a highly sensitive issue for Muslims across the
world, including in Afghanistan, where international troops are fighting to
defeat the militantly Islamist Taliban in a war that has entered its 11th year.
Experts in Islam say copies of the Koran should be buried or
released in flowing waters if they need to be disposed of, but religious
leaders in Afghanistan said Tuesday that local practice is not to dispose of
the texts at all.
In Washington,
White House spokesman Jay Carney echoed Allen’s apology, saying: “We apologize
to the Afghan people and disapprove of such conduct in the strongest possible
terms. This deeply unfortunate incident does not reflect the great respect our
military has for the Afghan people. It’s regrettable.”
Correspondents Sayed
Salahuddin and Walid Fazly contributed to this report.
|
@ The Washington Post
By LIAM STACK
CAIRO — Two Iranian warships docked in a
Syrian port on Monday as a senior Iranian lawmaker denounced American calls
for arming the Syrian opposition, adding to the international
tensions over the nearly yearlong crackdown by the government of President
Bashar al-Assad.
As government forces continued to pound
opposition strongholds, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it
was trying to negotiate a brief pause in the violence to deliver aid to the
most devastated areas.
Activist groups reported intensified attacks
on the besieged Baba Amr neighborhood in the central city of Homs. They said
the government’s inability to eradicate the opposition there despite weeks of
bombardment could be preventing the military from striking deeper and harder
into other parts of the country where armed resistance and rebellion are
believed to be growing, including Hama and Idlib Province to the north.
“The biggest challenge in Homs is Baba
Amr,” said Wissam Tarif, of the activist group Avaaz. “They cannot move
military power to Idlib or Hama without finishing Homs first. They cannot leave
any pockets of resistance behind them.” He said 16 people were killed in Homs
on Monday. Such reports are impossible to verify.
A video posted on YouTube showed an
artillery strike on Baba Amr that sent a plume of dark smoke into
the clear, sunny sky. “God is my only and best guardian,” muttered the panicked
videographer. “The world remains silent. Today is Feb. 20, 2012.”
Armed rebels have provided a measure of
security to some protesters in places like Hama, which was leveled 30 years ago
as Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, put down an uprising by the Muslim
Brotherhood, killing at least 10,000 people. In a video posted on YouTube on
Monday, several hundred
people jumped and danced in Halfaya, a neighborhood of Hama, in what
the video described as a regular “morning protest.”
Still, more than 50 checkpoints divide up
the city, said the Local Coordination Committees, a grass-roots group that
organizes and documents protests, and security forces have detained more than
500 people there in the past three weeks.
The living situation in Hama, Homs and
other hard-hit areas, including two suburbs of Damascus, Zabadani and Madaya,
has become increasingly grim. In Homs, supplies of food, baby formula, medicine
and potable water are all running out, said a spokeswoman for the committees.
“About two weeks ago, we sent 200 cans of
baby milk into Homs, and they said they could not even meet 10 percent of their
needs,” said the spokeswoman, Jasmine, who asked to use only one name for
security reasons. “Now, no one can get in or go out.”
The International Committee of the Red
Cross said it had begun negotiations with Syrian authorities for a pause in the
fighting of as little as a few hours.
“The I.C.R.C. is exploring several
possibilities for delivering urgently needed humanitarian aid,” Reuters quoted
a spokeswoman, Carla Haddad, as saying. “These include a cessation of fighting
in the most affected areas to facilitate swift Syrian Arab Red Crescent and
I.C.R.C. access to the people in need.”
The Iranian ships arrived in the Syrian
port, Tartus, days after the sharpest international rebuke to Mr. Assad so far:
the passage of a resolution in
the United Nations General Assembly condemning the crackdown and
calling for him to step aside. The current escalation of attacks on Homs and
other areas began early this month, after the same resolution was vetoed in the
Security Council by Russia and China. Russia recently sent ships to
the same Syrian port, activists said. Iran’s
semiofficial Fars News Agency called the ships “a serious warning” to the
United States, and quoted a senior Iranian lawmaker’s denunciations of comments
by Senator John McCain a day earlier in support of arming the Syrian
opposition.
“The presence of Iran and Russia’s
flotillas along the Syrian coast has a clear message against the United States’
possible adventurism,” said Hossein Ebrahimi, a vice chairman of the Iranian
Parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, Fars reported.
The mission and cargo of the ships are
unknown.
“In case of any U.S. strategic mistake in Syria,
there is a possibility that Iran, Russia and a number of other countries will
give a crushing response to the U.S.,” said Mr. Ebrahimi, according to Fars.
Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican who was
in Afghanistan on Sunday, told reporters there that he was in favor of arming
the Syrian opposition, while stressing that no direct American involvement was
necessary. In Cairo on Monday, he repeated that position.
“I am not calling for direct supply of
weapons to Syria,” Mr. McCain said. “We have seen in Libya that there are ways
to get weapons to people so that they can defend themselves. It is time that we
gave them the wherewithal to fight back and stop the slaughter.”
