By: Thousands of Iraqis protested after Friday prayers against caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad reprinted in European papers and the country's top Shiite cleric denounced the drawings.
A roadside bomb killed an American soldier north of Baghdad while gunmen killed a tribal leader and a policeman in the southern city of Basra, the U.S. military and Iraqi officials said Friday.
The caricatures, including one depicting the Muslim prophet wearing a turban fashioned into a bomb, were reprinted in Norwegian, French, German and, even, Jordanian papers after first appearing in a Danish paper in September. The caricatures were republished after Muslims decried the images as insulting to their prophet.
"We strongly denounce and condemn this horrific action," Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said of the caricatures in a statement posted on his Web site and dated Jan. 31.
Thousands of Iraqis staged demonstrations after weekly mosque prayer services on Friday. About 4,500 people joined rallies in Basra and hundreds at a Baghdad mosque. Danish flags were burned at both demonstrations.
Al-Sistani, who wields enormous influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, made no call for protests and suggested that militant Muslims were partly to blame for distorting Islam's image.
He referred to "misguided and oppressive" segments of the Muslim community and said their actions "projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love and brotherhood."
"Enemies have exploited this ... to spread their poison and revive their old hatreds with new methods and mechanisms," he said of the cartoons.
Though al-Sistani did not call for demonstrations, other Shiite Islamic and Sunni leaders across Iraq did.
The caricatures were first published in September in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The issue reignited last week after Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark and many European newspapers reprinted them this week.
The Jyllands-Posten had asked 40 cartoonists to draw images of the prophet. The purpose, its chief editor said, was "to examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues."
The 12 caricatures have prompted boycotts of Danish goods, bomb threats and demonstrations in front of Danish embassies across the Islamic world. Muslims have also directed their anger at other European countries, with Palestinian gunmen briefly kidnapping a German citizen Thursday and surrounding European Union headquarters in Gaza.
Islamic law, based on clerics' interpretation of the Quran and the sayings of the prophet, forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and other major religious figures - even positive ones - to prevent idolatry. Shiite Muslim clerics differ in that they allow images of their greatest saint, Ali, the prophet's son-in-law, though not Muhammad.
In Indonesia, 150 demonstrators hurled eggs at the building housing the Danish Embassy, then stormed in, pushing past security guards.
Shouting "God is Great," they tried to enter elevators to reach the mission on the building's 25th floor, but had to settle for tearing down a Danish flag and burning it on the pavement outside the building.
"We are not terrorists, we are not anarchists, but we are against those people who blaspheme Islam," a protester wearing white Arabic-style robes shouted outside the building.
Fundamentalist Muslims protested outside the Danish Embassy in Malaysia, chanting "Long live Islam, destroy our enemies" and accusing the Jyllands-Posten of seeking to incite hatred.
"It's an uncivilized act. It's heinous," said Hanifah Maidin, youth wing spokesman of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, demanding the Danish government apologize to the Muslim world.
About 800 people protested in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, chanting "Death to Denmark" and "Death to France." Another rally in the southern city of Karachi drew 1,200 people.
Pakistan's parliament unanimously voted to condemn the drawings as a "vicious, outrageous and provocative campaign" that has "hurt the faith and feelings of Muslims all over the world."
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said Friday he was shocked that Islamic hard-liners have burned flags to protest the caricatures. But he also criticized the drawings, saying "it isn't normal to caricature a whole religion as an extremist or even terrorist movement."
Dutch-language newspapers in Belgium and two Italian right-wing papers reprinted the drawings Friday.
"What shame, Europe gives in to Islam and apologizes for the satire of Allah," Italian newspaper Libero wrote under a banner headline.
In the latest Iraqi violence, the U.S. military said an American soldier assigned to Multi-National Division-Baghdad was killed Thursday - the sixth American military fatality this month.
The latest death took the number of U.S. military personnel killed to 2,248 since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Police in Basra also said gunmen killed a tribal leader, Sheik Baqir al-Issa, and a traffic policeman in separate shootings Friday in the city, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad.
The motives for the killings were not immediately clear. But Basra has witnessed a recent spike in violence linked to Shiite militia groups.
Iraqi officials raised the death toll to 16 in two car bombings which occurred 20 minutes apart on Thursday capital's eastern New Baghdad district. Thirteen were killed in the bombing at an outdoor market and the three others during the earlier blast at a gasoline station.
The bomber apparently wanted to attack a Shiite mosque but was prevented by barricades and turned to the market instead, police Capt. Mohammed Jassim said.
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