Thousands of supporters of populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr held a protest in front of the Swedish embassy in Baghdad yesterday to demand an end to diplomatic ties after a man set fire to a copy of the Holy Qur’an outside a mosque in Stockholm.
Protesters carried portraits of Sadr and his father, also a prominent cleric, as well as Iraqi flags, and chanted slogans.
People burned large rainbow-coloured flags representing the LGBT community. There was no apparent link between the attack and the LGBT community.
There was a smaller protest in the southern province of Dhi Qar. Sadr had called on Thursday for “mass angry protests against the Swedish embassy in Baghdad” and to demand the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador and the cutting of ties with Sweden.
“If you are defending freedoms and human rights so you should not have double standards,” said Sadr in a statement read by a Sadist leader at the rally yesterday.
“If you say that burning the flag of LGBT is considered a major hate crime ... then why don’t you consider burning the Holy Qur’an a major hate crime?”
Swedish police charged the man who burned the holy book with agitation against an ethnic or national group.
In a newspaper interview, he described himself as an Iraqi refugee seeking to ban it.
Iraq’s Foreign Ministry summoned Sweden’s ambassador on Thursday, urging the Swedish government to hand the man over so he could be tried in accordance with Iraqi law.
While Swedish police have rejected several recent applications for anti-Qur’an demonstrations, courts have overruled those decisions, saying they infringed on freedom of speech.
In its permit for Wednesday’s demonstration, Swedish police said that while it “may have foreign policy consequences”, the security risks and consequences linked to a Holy Qur’an burning were not of such a nature that the application should be rejected.
The governments of several Muslim countries, including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Morocco
have issued protests about
the incident.