By Ali Jabar and Jari Tanner | Associated Press
BAGHDAD — Tensions flared again in Iraq Saturday over a series of recent protests in Europe involving desecration of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, which have sparked a debate over the balance between freedom of speech and religious sensitivities.
Hundreds of protesters attempted to storm Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses foreign embassies and the seat of Iraq’s government, early Saturday following reports that an ultranationalist group burned a copy of the Quran in front of the Iraqi Embassy in the Danish capital, Copenhagen.
The protest came two days after people angered by the planned burning of the Islamic holy book in Sweden stormed the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad.
Security forces on Saturday pushed back protesters, who blocked the Jumhuriya bridge leading to the Green Zone, preventing them from reaching the Danish Embassy.
Elsewhere in Iraq, protesters burned three caravans belonging to a demining project run by the the Danish Refugee Council in the city of Basra in the south, local police said in a statement. The fire was extinguished by civil defense responders, and there were “no human casualties, only material losses,” the statement said.
Iraq’s prime minister has cut diplomatic ties with Sweden in protest over the desecration of the Quran in that country.
An Iraqi asylum-seeker who burned a copy of the Quran during a demonstration last month in Stockholm had threatened to do the same thing again Thursday but ultimately stopped short of setting fire to the book. He did, however, kick and step on it, and did the same with an Iraqi flag and a photo of influential Iraqi Shiite cleric and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr and of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The right to hold public demonstrations is protected by the constitution in Sweden, and blasphemy laws were abandoned in the 1970s. Police generally give permission based on whether they believe a…
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