SANAA, Yemen — Hundreds of protesters seemingly enraged by the Terry Jones/Sam Bacile anti-Islam film “Innocence of Muslims” stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen’s capital and burned the American flag on Thursday, chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” The attack marks the latest in a series of offensives on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.
The string of assaults this week, in Yemen, Egypt and the storming of a U.S. consulate in Libya that killed four Americans, is thought to have been instigated by Sam Bacile’s movie which denigrates Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. In the past, protests have broken out over perceived insults to Islam from the West, but in Arab countries they never escalated to the degree of breaching embassies, suggesting now hard-liners feel they can act with impunity.
Associated Press reports that hundreds converged Thursday on the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, which is heavily barricaded because of past al-Qaida-linked attacks on the compound. Yemeni guards at checkpoints on roads leading up to the compound did nothing to stop the crowd, said Ahmed Darwish, a witness who was at the scene.
Yemen’s president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, quickly apologized to the U.S. for the embassy attack and vowed track down the culprits, just as Libya’s president did. Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammad Morsi, who had been slow to speak out on Tuesday’s assault on the embassy in Cairo, promised Thursday that his government would not allow attacks on diplomatic missions.
U.S. officials suspect the Libya assault may have been a planned terror operation rather than a spontaneous mob assault. While protesters in other countries were unarmed, a crowd bristling with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades overwhelmed the consulate in Benghazi late Tuesday, killing the ambassador and three other Americans.
Protests continued to spread. In Egypt, riot police again clashed with protesters thwarted the night before.
In Iraq, several hundred Shiite hardliners protested in Baghdad’s Shiite stronghold of Sadr City. The leader of an Iranian-backed Shiite militia that previously attacked U.S. troops, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, threatened anti-U.S. attacks.
In Iran, about 50 protesters shouted, “Death to America,” outside the Swiss Embassy, which looks after U.S. diplomatic interests in Iran. Riot police kept the crowd away from the building.
The movie “will put all the American interests in Iraq in danger,” the militia leader, Qais al-Khazali, told The Associated Press.