The burning of the copies of the Holy Qur’an at the Bagram compound earlier this week has deepened public mistrust of NATO forces struggling to stabilize Afghanistan before foreign combat troops withdraw in 2014.
Hundreds of Afghans marched toward the palace of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, while on the other side of the capital protesters hoisted the white flag of the Taleban.
Chanting “Death to America!” and “Long live Islam!,” protesters also threw rocks at police in Kabul, while Afghan Army helicopters circled above.
Armed protesters took refuge in shops in the eastern part of the city, where they killed one demonstrator, said police at the scene. In another Kabul rally, police said they were unsure who fired the shots that killed a second protester.
Seven more protesters were killed in the western province of Herat, two more in eastern Khost province and one in the relatively peaceful northern Baghlan province, health and local officials said. In Herat, around 500 men charged at the US consulate.
US President Barack Obama had sent a letter to Karzai apologizing for the unintentional burning of the Qur’an copies, after Afghan laborers found charred copies while collecting rubbish.
Afghanistan wants NATO to put those responsible on public trial.
In neighboring US ally Pakistan, about 400 members of a hard-line group staged protests. “If you burn the Holy Qur’an, we will burn you,” they shouted.
To Afghanistan’s west, Iranian cleric Ahmad Khatami said the U.S. had purposely burned the Korans. “These apologies are fake. The world should know that America is against Islam,” he said in a speech broadcast live on state radio.
“It (the Koran burning) was not a mistake. It was an intentional move, done on purpose.”
Most Westerners have been confined to their heavily fortified compounds, including at the sprawling U.S. embassy complex and other diplomatic missions, as protests that have killed a total of 23 people, including two US soldiers, rolled into their fourth day.
The embassy, in a message on the microblogging site Twitter, urged US citizens to “please be safe out there” and expanded movement restrictions to relatively peaceful northern provinces, where large demonstrations also occurred on Thursday, including the attempted storming of a Norwegian military base.
The Taliban urged Afghan security forces on Thursday to “turn their guns on the foreign infidel invaders” and repeatedly urged Afghans to kill, beat and capture NATO soldiers.
Germany, which has the third-largest foreign presence in the NATO-led war, pulled out several weeks early of a small base in the northern Takhar province on Friday over security concerns, a defense ministry spokesman said.