Home > Worst anti-US protests spread across Afghanistan

Worst anti-US protests spread across Afghanistan

by Open-Publishing - Friday 13 May 2005
11 comments

Demos-Actions International USA

KABUL — The biggest anti-US protests since the fall of the Taliban spread across Afghanistan on May 12, as unrest sparked by alleged abuse of the Koran at the US jail in Guantanamo Bay left three more people dead.

Seven people have been killed and at least 76 injured during three days of violent demonstrations, all of them in clashes with security forces and police in conservative towns east of the capital Kabul.

Angry Afghans shouting "Death to America" poured onto the streets of Kabul itself for the first time on Thursday and protests at the reported religious slur have now broken out in 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

The Koran controversy has also spread to Pakistan, where demonstrations were held in Peshwar and Quetta, two major cities close to the border with Afghanistan.

Two protesters were killed on Thursday when gunfire broke out as police stopped them marching into the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad from a district just to the northwest, a provincial official said.

Jalalabad was the scene of a major riot on Wednesday in which four people died when police opened fire to control a mob that torched the buildings of several aid agencies, the Pakistani consulate and the governor’s house.

"Two demonstrators died and one was seriously injured in Khogyani district today after armed protestors opened fire at police," deputy governor of Nangarhar province Mohammad Asif Qazizada said.

However a provincial spokesman said earlier that security forces had opened fire on a gathering of 100 villagers in Khagyani.

Meanwhile one person died and four were wounded when rioters attacked a police station in Chak district of Wardak province, which borders Kabul, and a weapons store exploded, interior ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said.

The protests were sparked by a small report in Newsweek magazine last week that interrogators at the US military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, desecrated copies of the Koran by leaving them in toilet cubicles and even stuffing one down a lavatory to rattle Muslim prisoners.

More than 500 detainees, most captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, are held as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo.

The US, which leads a coalition of some 18,000 troops hunting Taliban militants three years after the regime was toppled, has promised to look into the claims. The US military has not been involved in policing the protests.

But in Kabul, student demonstrators shouted slogans calling on US President George W. Bush to apologise to Islamic countries and set a US flag ablaze. The protest ended peacefully.

Thousands of people also took to the streets in the northern provinces of Parwan, Kapisa and Takhar, Laghman in the east, Logar and Khost in the southeast and the southern province of Kandahar.

The United Nations and foreign aid agencies evacuated hundreds of workers from Jalalabad fearing further violence.

Afghan officials have suggested that elements opposed to the US-backed effort to rebuild the war-ravaged country have coordinated the violence, and protests come amid a recent deterioration in security.

A candidate in September’s first post-Taliban elections was killed in a firefight on Wednesday that also left his driver and two suspected Taliban militants dead.

Veteran Afghan analyst Rahimullah Yusufzai said the protests gave the public a chance to vent their anger at President Hamid Karzai’s government and the United States itself, but were unlikely to be coordinated.

"This is the biggest protest campaign in Afghanistan since the ouster of Taliban regime. This is bloody, widespread and countrywide," the Pakistan-based analyst said.

"This also shows that they are fed up with the United States and they just needed a spark to vent their feelings," he said.

Previous anti-US protests in Afghanistan were sparked by the deaths of civilians in US military operations and by the Iraq war but none has been on a similar scale.

Karzai, who is currently in Brussels, said on Wednesday that the clash in Jalalabad showed the "inability" of Afghanistan’s institutions to deal with such situations.

http://www.metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20050512-030629-6571r

Forum posts

  • If anything it just shows how muslims really aren’t capable of living under a democracy. They really aren’t very tolerant and the protests also indicate their simple-mindedness.

    • Think how some of the neocon "Christians" would start foaming at the mouth if they heard that muslims were using the Bible to wipe their backsides.

  • If Muslims aren’t capable of living in a democracy, why are our soldiers dying to bring democracy to them? This dual standard appears in a book by Richard Perle, where he urges a democratic revolution be brought on, but goes on to say that Muslims are too unruly for it.

    True conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, balk at costly foreign military interventions of questionable value (which you seem to think of the Iraq effort), as did our Founding Fathers. Reagan pulled US troops out of Lebanon in 1982.

    I wonder whether demeaning Muslims is meant to create ill-will towards them, or as some perturbed effort to support the US Occupation. Either way, you deny either the conservative vision or our purposes there.

    I for one think supporting the troops is the right thing to do. The besy way to do that is remain silent on issues which antagonize the enemy population, or give others reasons to hate us. Contempt for religious tolerance is one thing; stirring up revolts is another. You can’t criticize the purpose for the war if you believe in the cause of democracy which Bush supports.

    Therefore you are either an imposter or misleader.

    • Between 1994 and 1997, the U.S. was supporting the Taliban in the sense that it was allowing Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, its two allies in the region, to back the Taliban. This was because the U.S. and U.S. oil companies were interested in building oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia across Afghanistan, through Pakistan, to the Gulf…[T]here was the hope at one time, by U.S. policymakers, that the Taliban would provide a kind of security force for these pipelines, because these pipelines were crossing southern Afghanistan, which is the heartland of Taliban control.
      The U.S. oil giant Unocal was particularly bold in sucking up to the Taliban, even flying representatives of the regime to its corporate headquarters in Texas. The Taliban were offered a cut of the profits from the pipelines; 15 percent was mentioned. A U.S. official observed that, with the Caspian’s oil and gas flowing, Afghanistan would become ‘like Saudi Arabia,’ an oil colony with no democracy and the legal persecution of women. ‘We can live with that,’ he said.
      "EITHER YOU accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." That’s how one U.S. diplomat reportedly put it to Afghanistan’s Taliban government during negotiations for the oil pipeline that began just after George W. Bush took over the White House in January 2001—and continued until just weeks before September 11

  • If that is a true story, the man who said "bury you under a carpet of gold, or a carpet of bombs" should be promoted and elevated, and givena Congressional Medal of Honor for looking out for his country. The Talban had a choice: Osama bin Laden or the USA. As the SecDef said, they chose wrong. End of discussion. And end of the Taliban.

    Gardis
    USA
    Liberalism and Terrorism: Different Stages of the Same Disease

    • That’s cute. A congressional medal of HONOR for offering a choice between a huge bribe or death to a country to obtain control of their geography for the purpose of increasing energy stockpiles and oil company profits, all of this BEFORE 9/11 . Hell, why not make him amassador to Afghanistan while you’re at it ?
      —J.C.—

    • Our Idiot troll Gardis chimes in. You say if that is true then blah blah blah.... Osama Bin Laden blah blah blah....You are so full of shit that you must have your head planted up Bush’s ass. Obviously you missed the entire meaning of the conversation and the history which even a moron would be able to see through, but being just an idiot, it went right over your head. Good work, someone needs to award you the golden dunce cap to go over your little pointy head. Why don’t you come up for air once in a while and clean the shit out of your head. Better yet stop trolling here you’re unwelcome.

    • That man... like Gardis.... was an idiot. The Taliban were told to hand over Bin Laden. They said, fine, just provide some evidence and you can have him..... I wonder why they couldn’t provide any? And never forget that Bush had the Taliban in Texas talking about oil.... he didn’t have a problem with them then.

  • "If anything it just shows how muslims really aren’t capable of living under a democracy. They really aren’t very tolerant and the protests also indicate their simple-mindedness."

    This sentence pictures a mindeset which also lead to the killing of the American natives: the indians.

    I found it very sad that Afghan soldiers are aiming their American delivered guns at their own citizens.
    Democracy? Freedom?

    Well the majority of the Afghan people might be simple minded, but who has the right to kill them?

    We also see similar events on TV when American police shoot for their pleasure at American civilians.
    Coincidence? No the very same sick mindset!

    Lex Americana is Lex homocide!

    • I’m not really sure what information you’re receiving but it is obvious that it is not based on reality.

      Muslims are simple-minded. Look how easily they have been manipulated by Newsweek’s retracted article. Did christians riot when their own religious figures were desecrated by "artists"? Did buddhists riot when the taliban blew up the buddhist statues in Afghanistan? Did jews riot every time some muslim isalmofascist said anything horrible about judaism? NO! Muslims are the only ones who are easily incited to do damage. They lack critical thinking skills. Having said that, one should still try to help muslims towards democracy no matter how inappropriate they are for it.

    • Before you say "Muslims are simple-minded" you should really have an IQ bigger than your shoe size.
      You pig ignorant muppet.