Police clashed with anti-United States demonstrators in two Afghan towns on Thursday, killing at least three people, as protests spread across the country over the reported abuse of the Qur’an at the US jail in Guantánamo Bay.
Two people were killed during demonstrations in Khagyani, a town near the eastern city of Jalalabad, where four people died on Wednesday.
A third protester died in a separate clash with police in Wardak province, south of Kabul.
The death toll from three days of unrest is now seven and the riots are the bloodiest anti-American protests in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
Shouting ”Death to America”, ”Death to Bush”, and ”Long live Islam” the students paraded through the capital, Kabul, where a large number of security forces had been deployed to prevent possible riots.
Later the US flag was burned, and in the south of the city angry protesters stormed the offices of two international relief organisations.
”It’s the symbols of this change in Afghanistan that have been singled out,” Paul Barker, the director of Care International, whose offices were attacked, told the Associated Press. ”There are probably people around the country inciting this.”
Barker said that school students attacked the Care office. Valuable equipment was destroyed and one Care worker beaten.
The ostensible source of the anger was a report in Newsweek magazine which claimed that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had placed a copy of the Qur’an on toilets to unsettle suspects, and had ”flushed a holy book down the toilet”.
After the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, American troops imprisoned hundreds of people in the belief that they were connected to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Many were Pakistanis and Afghans who upon release said that they endured torture and humiliation.
There are some reports that this week’s riots were carefully orchestrated, and some noted that they sprang up on Tuesday from Jalalabad University, a stronghold of the anti-American warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Others noted that the heavy-handed tactics of US troops chasing suspected Taliban fighters near the Pakistani border had led to many locals becoming increasingly resentful of the presence of the coalition forces.
Two women were killed and at least 50 people, including 20 children, were hurt in a grenade attack by Islamist rebels outside a missionary school in Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmir. The blast near the school, not far from the bustling market area, was the second attack in two days in the city by militants fighting Indian rule. – Guardian Unlimited Â