Later videos showed smoke rising from a building in the embassy complex. Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the videos…reports Asian Lite News
Hundreds of protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad in the early hours of Thursday morning and set it on fire, a source familiar with the matter and a Reuters witness said.
The source said no embassy staff had been harmed and declined to elaborate further. Swedish embassy officials in Baghdad did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The protest was called by supporters of Shi’ite cleric Muqtada Sadr ahead of an expected burning of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, in Sweden – which in the past has led to widespread protests and condemnation in Muslim-majority nations.
A series of videos posted by One Baghdad, a popular Telegram channel that supports Sadr, showed people gathering around the embassy around 1 a.m. on Thursday (2200 GMT on Wednesday) and storming the embassy complex around an hour later.
Later videos showed smoke rising from a building in the embassy complex. Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the videos.
It was not immediately clear if anyone was inside the embassy at the time of the storming.
Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Twitter that it “condemns in the strongest terms” the burning of the embassy and that the government had instructed the security authorities to conduct “an urgent investigation” and to take security measures in order to “identify the perpetrators of this act and hold them accountable according to the law.”
In June, after a man tore up and burned the Quran outside the central mosque in Stockholm on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, hundreds of people in Iraq protested outside the Baghdad embassy at the urging of Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist cleric.
He had called on the Iraqi government to break off diplomatic relations with Sweden, which he said was “hostile” to Islam.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, said earlier this month that his country would refrain from sending a new ambassador to Sweden in protest, Reuters reported. And Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned Sweden’s chargé d’affaires to condemn what it said was an insult to the most sacred Islamic values.
“Although administrative procedures to appoint a new ambassador to Sweden have ended, the process of dispatching them has been held off due to the Swedish government’s issuing of a permit to desecrate the Holy Quran,” Amirabdollahian said on Twitter.
Egypt called the burning of the Quran “a disgraceful act,” and Saudi Arabia said that such “hateful and repeated acts cannot be accepted with any justification.” Malaysia’s foreign minister said the desecration of the holy book during an important holiday was “offensive to Muslims worldwide.”
The Swedish police charged the man who burned the Quran with agitation against an ethnic or national group. In a newspaper interview, he described himself as an Iraqi refugee seeking to ban it.
The protest on Thursday was also called by supporters of Mr. al-Sadr.
