Hundreds of protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in the early hours of Thursday morning and set it on fire ahead of a planned burning of a Quran in Sweden. Smoke was rising from the Swedish embassy building and dozens of demonstrators were still on the scene, while large numbers of Iraqi riot police had been deployed, an AFP correspondent said.

The Swedish foreign ministry press office issued a statement denouncing the incident and emphasizing the importance of diplomatic missions being safeguarded by Iraqi authorities. The statement also stated that all embassy personnel in Baghdad were safe.

According to posts in a popular Telegram channel connected to the influential cleric and other pro-Sadr media, the Thursday rally was organized by Shi'ite cleric Muqtada Sadr followers to oppose the second scheduled Koran burning in Sweden in recent weeks.

“We didn’t wait until morning, we broke in at dawn and set fire to the Swedish embassy," a young demonstrator in Baghdad told AFP on Thursday, before chanting the leader’s name.

In June, after a man tore up and burned the Quran outside the central mosque in Stockholm on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, hundreds of people in Iraq protested outside the Baghdad embassy at the urging of Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist cleric.

Swedish police charged the man with agitation against an ethnic or national group. In a newspaper interview, he described himself as an Iraqi refugee seeking to ban the Koran, the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God.

Several Muslim nations, including Iraq, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Morocco, have expressed their outrage at the incident, with Iraq calling for the man's extradition so that he might stand trial there.

The United States also denounced it, but they emphasized that by granting the visa, Sweden was promoting freedom of expression rather than endorsing the deed.

Image source: Reuters