The United States has ordered non-essential embassy employees to flee Tunisia and Sudan, while Al Qaeda urges worldwide terrorist attacks on the American and Western targets as the fundamentalist Islamic backlash spreads over the “Innocence of Muslims” film posted on the Internet.
Sudan has refused an American request that it send Marines special forces to help protect the embassy after protesters attacked it Friday.
At least six Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, have been killed since the uprisings and Al Qaeda-inspired terrorist attacks began last week. Three other Americans were killed in the attack in Libya, and two Marines were killed in Afghanistan when heavily armed Taliban terrorists stormed a strongly fortified air base in Helmand province where Britain’s Prince Harry is deployed, killing two US Marines.
Al Qaeda’s call for more violence, as reported by the SITE intelligence Group, is a direct challenge to President Barack Obama’s claim that the elimination of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was the “beginning of the end” of Al Qaeda.
Terrorists have listed embassies, schools and fast food chains among their targets, AFP reported.
“May the expulsion of embassies and consulates lead to the liberation of Arab lands from the American hegemony and arrogance,” Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said in a statement, according to SITE.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Washington asserted that the armed forced are prepared to cope with widespread violence. “We have to be prepared in the event that these demonstrations get out of control,” Panetta told Foreign Policy magazine.
Counter-terrorist Marine units have been deployed to Libya and Yemen, and two destroyers have been stationed off the North African coast.
The anti-American protests have spread to the Western world, where police in Sydney fired pepper spray to contain protesters trying to enter the building housing the U.S. consulate. Hundreds also demonstrated in Belgium, France, Israel, Indonesia and the Maldives.
In Cairo, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the highest seat of Sunni Muslim learning, called for an international resolution banning all forms of attacks on Islam and other religions, in a letter to UN chief Ban Ki-moon.
The resolution should “criminalize attacks on Islamic symbols and on those of other religions, after the violence against those who provoked challenges to world peace and international security,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb said.
Germany, fearing Muslim fury, has taken steps to prevent a screening of the “Innocence of Muslims” in Berlin by a far-right group. Germany’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told the weekly he would do everything in his power to stop them, AFP reported.
