Death toll rises as Muslim protest goes global over blasphem film.

The revulsion in the Muslim world for a controversial film about Mohammed has now gone global, with demonstrations that began in Egypt and Libya now spread through the Middle East and into Africa and Asia.

Fanned by the internet the flames of indignation exploded after Friday prayers to engulf mainly American targets as tens of thousands took to the streets. In all six people died in clashes in Tunisia, Sudan, Lebanon, and Egypt.

In Tunisia the outer walls of the US embassy were breached and Islamist black flags raised over the building. The nearby American school was destroyed by fire. Tunisia’s president said the violence was “totally unacceptable”. Two people died and forty were injured, twenty of them police officers.

The American embassy in the Sudanese capital Khartoum was also penetrated by protesters. The US immediately dispatched a platoon of marines following similar deployments to their Yemen and Libyan embassies. The German embassy was set on fire.

In Lebanon, where the Pope is currently on a visit, 25 people were injured and one killed in clashes in Tripoli, where reportedly islamists went on the rampage against American fast-food outlets.

Elsewhere Bangladeshi police prevented a crowd of 10,000 from marching on the embassy in Dhaka, thousands protested in Iran, the West Bank and Gaza, and there were also rallies in Malasia, Nigeria, Jordan, Kenya, Bahrain, Qatar, Pakistan, and Iraq.

To report also an attack to the UK/US base "Camp Bastion" in Helmand province in Southern Afghanistan.

Taliban claimed the attack that killed 2 US soldiers.

More on this at  BBC Website

Muslim world anger rises over film

The California-made film on the Profet triggered an attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya's city of Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans on Tuesday, the anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

In Tunis, at least five people were wounded by police gunfire near the U.S. embassy, and a big fire had reportedly erupted within the embassy compound. Protesters had earlier leapt over the compound wall.

Witnesses said Sudanese police fired tear gas at thousands of protesters to prevent them from approaching the U.S. embassy outside Khartoum, but some jumped over the wall

The wave of indignation and rage over the film, which portrays the Prophet Mohammad as a womanizer and a fool, coincided with Pope Benedict's arrival in Lebanon for a three-day visit.

The protests present Obama with a new foreign policy crisis less than two months before seeking re-election and tests Washington's relations with democratic governments it helped to power across the Arab world.

It also emerged that Libya had closed its air space over Benghazi airport temporarily because of heavy anti-aircraft fire by Islamists aiming at U.S. reconnaissance drones flying over the city, after President Barack Obama vowed to bring the ambassador's killers to justice.

The closure of the airport prompted speculation that the United States was deploying special forces in preparation for an attack against the militants who were involved in the attack.

A Libyan official said the spy planes flew over the embassy compound and the city, taking photos and inspecting locations of radical militant groups who are believed to have planned and staged the attack on the U.S. consulate.

There were protests in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

MARINES TO YEMEN

The Pentagon said it had sent a "fast" platoon of Marines to Yemen to bolster U.S. embassy security after clashes in Sanaa.

U.S. embassies were the main target of anger and protest but most embassy staff were not at work because Friday is the Muslim weekend across the Arab World.

The frenzy erupted after traditional Muslim Friday prayers. Fury over the film has been stoked by Internet video footage, social networks, preachers and word-of-mouth.

Protesters clashed with police near the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Two Islamist preachers in Egypt told worshippers that those who made the movie deserved to die under sharia (Islamic law) but they urged protesters not to take their anger out on diplomats or others.

Sudanese demonstrators broke into the German embassy in Khartoum and hoisted an Islamic flag, while one person was killed in protests in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

Police in the Sudanese capital had fired tear gas to try to disperse 5,000 protesters who had ringed the German embassy and nearby British mission. Witness said police stood by as a crowd forced its way into Germany's mission.

Demonstrators hoisted a black Islamic flag saying in white letters "there is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet". They smashed windows, cameras and furniture in the building and then started a fire.

Staff at Germany's embassy were safe "for the moment", Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said in Berlin. He also told Khartoum's envoy to Berlin that Sudan must protect diplomatic missions on its soil.

Sudan's Foreign Ministry had criticized Germany for allowing a protest last month by right-wing activists carrying caricatures of the Prophet and for Chancellor Angela Merkel giving an award in 2010 to a Danish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet in 2005 triggering protests across the Islamic world.

BASHIR UNDER PRESSURE

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is under pressure from Islamists who feel the government has given up the religious values of his 1989 Islamist coup.

The official body of Sudan's Islamic scholars called for the faithful to defend the Prophet peacefully, but at a meeting of Islamists, some leaders had said they would march on the German and U.S. embassies and demanded the ambassadors be expelled.

The Foreign Ministry said in its statement: "The German chancellor unfortunately welcomed this offence to Islam in a clear violation of all meanings of religious co-existence and tolerance between religions."

Sudan used to host prominent militants in the 1990s, such as Osama bin Laden, but the government has sought to distance itself from radicals to improve ties with the West.

A Lebanese security source said a man was killed in Tripoli as protesters tried to storm a government building.

Earlier, a U.S. fast food restaurant was set alight. Twelve members of the security forces were wounded by stones thrown by protesters, the source said.

Protesters also clashed with police in Yemen, where one person died and 15 were injured on Thursday when the U.S. embassy compound was stormed.

U.S. and other Western embassies in other Muslim countries had tightened security, fearing anger at the film may prompt attacks on their compounds after the weekly worship.

Obama has promised to bring those responsible for the Benghazi attack to justice, and the United States also sent warships towards Libya which one official said was to give flexibility for any future action.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington had nothing to do with the crudely made film posted on the Internet, which she called "disgusting and reprehensible", and the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff called a Christian pastor in Florida to ask him to withdraw his support for it.

Palestinians staged demonstrations in both the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli police, some on horseback, used stun grenades and made a number of arrests outside Jerusalem's Old City as a few dozen demonstrators tried to march on the nearby U.S. consulate.

"Israeli police prevented an illegal demonstration from reaching the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem and used stun grenades after rocks and bottles were thrown at them," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

In Nablus, in the northern West Bank, several hundred people protested and burned an American flag, witnesses said.

AMERICAN FLAGS BURNED

The largest protests were in the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Islamist group Hamas, with at least 30,000 Palestinians staging rallies across the coastal territory.

Some 25,000 took to the streets of Gaza City, answering a call by Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad faction and waving the green and black flags of the two factions.

American and Israeli flags were set alight, along with an effigy of the film's producer.

Protesters in Afghanistan set fire to an effigy of Obama and burned a U.S. flag after Friday prayers in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

Directing their anger against the U.S. pastor who supported the film, tribal leaders also agreed to put a $100,000 bounty on his head.

About 10,000 people held a noisy protest in the Bangladeshi capital. They burned U.S. flags, chanted anti-U.S. slogans and demanded punishment for the offenders, but were stopped from marching to the U.S. embassy. There was no violence.

Thousands of Iranians held nationwide protests. There were also rallies in Malaysia, Jordan, Kenya, Bahrain, Qatar, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Iraq.

Pakistani network Haqquani blacklisted by US

The decision to blacklist the Haqqani network, by U.S.in a an announcement made by  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a trip to Russia could rise tensions between Washington and Islamabad very tense since Bin Laden’s killing by Navy Seals last year, and have far-reaching implications for any reconciliation process in Afghanistan.

Senior Haqqani commanders warned as much, saying that it showed the United States was not sincere about peace efforts in Afghanistan. The commanders also said it would bring hardship for America's only prisoner of war, U.S. Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who is being held by the militants.

The Haqqanis, a Pashtun tribe with strongholds in southeastern Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan, are blamed by Washington for an attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul and other assaults in Afghanistan.

The United States accuses Pakistan's intelligence agency of supporting the Haqqani network and using it as a proxy in Afghanistan to gain leverage against the growing influence of its arch-rival India in the country. Pakistan denies the allegations.

But whether to brand the group as a terrorist organization has been the subject of intense debate within the Obama administration, with some officials arguing it will have little real impact but risks setting back Afghan reconciliation efforts.

Clinton said in a statement that she had told the U.S. Congress she will brand the Haqqani network a foreign terrorist organization, subjecting the group and its members to additional sanctions, including an asset freeze.

"We also continue our robust campaign of diplomatic, military and intelligence pressure on the network, demonstrating the United States' resolve to degrade the organization's ability to execute violent attacks," said Clinton, who was in Vladivostok for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

The United States also has targeted the Haqqanis with military strikes. U.S. and Pakistani officials say they have high confidence that Badruddin Haqqani, a top commander and son of the group's founder, was killed in a U.S. drone strike last month.

Clinton signed the report to Congress on Friday in Brunei stating that the network met the criteria to be designated as a foreign terrorist organization, the State Department said. A U.S. official said the formal designation would be made in the coming days.

Formal designation as a foreign terrorist organization would increase pressure on the Pakistani government, but any actual effects beyond that were unclear since most of the Haqqani leaders have already been blacklisted individually.

It also remained unclear how much damage the U.S. decision could do to ties with Islamabad. Relations have warmed slightly in recent months following a U.S. apology for an airstrike that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, but remain fraught.

A senior Pakistani security official said blacklisting the Haqqani network would be counterproductive and would put unnecessary pressure on Islamabad, a strategic U.S. ally.

"If the United States wants to have a constructive relationship with Pakistan, then this is a bad move," the official said. "This will push Pakistan into a corner."

A spokesman for Pakistan's embassy in Washington said: "This is an internal matter for the United States. It is not our business. The Haqqanis are not Pakistani nationals."

In June, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the United States was reaching the limits of its patience with Pakistan because of the safe havens that groups like the Haqqanis found there.

Designation by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization would bring sanctions such as criminal penalties for anyone providing material support to the group and seizure of any assets in the United States.

The Obama administration faced a congressional deadline this weekend to determine whether the network met the criteria for such designation.

In Congress, both Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, a Republican, applauded the move and urged Pakistan to do more to take on the Haqqanis.

"This is a terrorist organization and an enemy of the United States, and I urge Pakistan to redouble its efforts - working with U.S. and Afghan partners — to eliminate the Haqqani threat," Feinstein said in a statement.

MAFIA GROUP

The Haqqanis run a sophisticated and diverse financial network comparable to a mafia group, according to a July report by the Center for Combating Terrorism.

It said the group raised money through kidnapping, extortion and drug trafficking but also had a business portfolio that included import/export, transport, real estate and construction interests in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf.

But the group has never had to deal with a sustained attack on its finances, author Gretchen Peters said, and might be vulnerable to cash flow choke points and attacks on its small and centralized command structure.

"Network leaders appear to be as motivated by profit-making as they are driven by issues like revenge, honor and ideology," the report said.

In Kabul, a government spokesman said any move by Washington against the Haqqanis was welcome.

"This will be a major step by the United States against the Haqqani network who are still plotting for dangerous and destructive attacks against us," said Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi.

Growing insider attacks cause US to stop training Afghan forces.

The U.S. military has halted the training of Afghan government-backed militias for at least a month to revamp the system of vetting of new recruits for ties to insurgents after a string of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police on their international allies, officials said yesterday.
There have been 34 green-on-blue attacks this year that have killed 45 international troops, throwing doubt on the ability of Afghan and coalition forces to live and work together during a key time in the transition to Afghan control of security. One of the pillars of the international troop drawdown is for allied forces to hand over responsibility for the country’s security to Afghans by the end of 2014.
Lt. Col. John Harrell, a spokesman for U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan, said the pause in training affects about 1,000 trainees of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a militia backed by the government in Kabul.
“The training of the ALP recruits has been paused while we go through this re-vetting process, to take a look at this process to see if there’s anything that we can improve,” Harrell said. “It may take a month, it may take two months, we don’t know.”
Afghan Local Police forces that have already been trained will continue to operate, and the government will continue to recruit new members, Harrell said. Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for the international military coalition in Afghanistan, also said there was no set date for the training of the local police to resume.

Harrell said the Americans last month also put a two-week pause on operations by the Afghan Special Forces last month to re-vet those soldiers for any potential ties to insurgents. He did not say whether any suspicious links were uncovered.

The international forces in Afghanistan have been revisiting security for their forces in the wake of the recent attacks on international troops, the most recent of which took place last week when an Afghan army soldier turned his gun on Australian soldiers, killing three of them. NATO has some 130,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban’s decade-long insurgency alongside government forces.
 Most of the NATO troops are set to withdraw by the end of 2014 that will put Afghan security forces in charge of security for their war-battered country. The process is already under way, with security responsibilities of about half of the Afghan population transferred to the local security forces.