A few dozen people stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, on Thursday to protest against the Swedish government and the decision to allow a demonstration in Stockholm in which the Koran was burned on Wednesday.
The demonstrators gathered on the instructions of the Shiite preacher Muqtada al Sadr, entered the building that houses the Swedish embassy with protest signs and shouting slogans in defense of the Koran: after about fifteen minutes, when some security agents intervened, they left the embassy.
Muqtada al Sadr is the most important and well-known religious in Iraq and abroad, as well as a powerful political leader: he had won the last elections in October 2022, but without obtaining the majority necessary to appoint a president and proceed with the formation of a government . In recent years, his followers have become the protagonists of numerous protests, including violent ones.
On Wednesday in Stockholm, Salwan Momika, a man of Iraqi origin residing in Sweden with asylum seeker status, burned some pages of the Koran in front of Stockholm’s largest mosque. Authorized by the Swedish police after the intervention of a judge, the demonstration had caused strong protests throughout the Islamic world. Official reactions have come, among others, from the governments of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Jordan and Turkey.
The Baghdad demonstration (AP Photo/Ali Jabar)
For Muslims, the Koran is the direct expression of the sacred word of Allah and any behavior that does not respect it is considered highly offensive: Momika in Stockholm, in addition to burning some pages, had also put a slice of bacon in the book (pigs are unclean by Muslims) and had cleaned his shoes with others. He had said he did it because according to him the book would represent “a danger to democratic laws and to Swedish and human values”.
A statement from the protesters: “Expel the Swedish ambassador immediately” (AP Photo/Ali Jabar)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has defined what happened in Stockholm as “unacceptable”: in January a demonstration by the Swedish far-right in which a copy of the Koran had been burned had complicated the negotiations for Sweden’s entry into NATO, subject to an approval by Turkey (the only member country together with Hungary that has not ratified it). Those negotiations are still blocked and the latest episode risks making them even more complex. Erdogan said Thursday: “We will teach arrogant Westerners that insulting Muslims is not part of freedom of thought.”
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The demonstration in Stockholm, which was attended by about 200 people, was initially banned by the police due to possible security risks, but two weeks ago a Swedish court decided to overturn the police decision, following an appeal by Momika, arguing that the security risks were not such as to prevent the right to burn the Koran, within the rights guaranteed by freedom of expression. Now the man would be under investigation for “incitement to hatred”. Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, head of a centre-right government, called the burning of the Koran “legal but inappropriate”.