Kabul, Afghanistan – International peacekeepers clashed Tuesday with Afghans protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, leaving three demonstrators dead and prompting NATO to send reinforcements to a remote northern city.
Senior Afghan officials said al-Qaeda and the Taliban could be exploiting anger over the published cartoons to incite violence, which spread to six cities in a second day of unrest in Afghanistan.
Demonstrations rumbled on around the Muslim world, and the political repercussions deepened, with Iran suspending all trade and economic ties with Denmark, where the drawings were first published.
In a new turn, an Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, invited artists to enter a Holocaust cartoon competition, saying it wanted to see if freedom of expression – the banner under which many Western publications reprinted the prophet drawings – also applied to Holocaust images.
An aid group that provides food to tens of thousands of people in the war-ravaged Chechnya region of Russia suspended its operations after Chechen officials banned all Danish organizations because of the cartoons. The Danish Refugee Council distributes food to about 250,000 people in mostly Muslim Chechnya and the surrounding area.
The drawings include one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb.
Islam is interpreted to forbid any illustrations of Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry.
Violence has escalated sharply in Afghanistan this week, and seven people have died in demonstrations in the past two days.
Protests, sometimes involving armed men, have been directed at foreign and Afghan government targets – fueling suspicions there’s more behind the unrest than religious sensitivities.
“It’s an incredibly emotive issue. This is something that really upset Afghans,” said Joanna Nathan, senior Afghanistan analyst at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels, Belgium- based research institute. “But it is also being used to agitate and motivate the crowds by those against the government and foreign forces” in Afghanistan.
The heads of the United Nations, the European Union and the world’s largest Islamic grouping appealed for calm.
“Aggression against life and property can only damage the image of a peaceful Islam,” said a statement released jointly Tuesday by Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan and EU chief Javier Solana.
