US missions brace for anti-Islam film protests

Ed Giles / Getty Images Contributor
Riot police throw rocks toward protesters during clashes near the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and Tahrir Square on Friday.
By NBC News staff and wire reports
Egyptian protesters angry at a film offending the Prophet Muhammad hurled stones at police near the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Friday, as American missions across the Arab world and beyond tightened security in expectation of anti-U.S. demonstrations on the Muslim day of prayer.
Cairo police in riot gear fired tear gas and threw stones back at the demonstrators. A burned-out car was overturned in the middle of the street that leads to the fortified embassy from Tahrir Square, the locus point of massive demonstrations that led to the ouster of pro-American dictator Hosni Mubarak last year.
The Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood has led calls for a "million-man march" in Cairo on Friday to protest the film and the United States.
More photos: Protesters clash with cops near US Embassy in Cairo
Triggered by an obscure, anti-Islam video made in the U.S.?and released on the internet, angry protests by Muslims have been directed at U.S. diplomatic missions in at least 11 countries this week. Many Muslims have questioned why the U.S. authorities have not taken action against the filmmakers.
On Tuesday, in an assault that U.S. officials say may have been planned in advance by an al-Qaida-linked group, attackers killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans at the U.S. Consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
President Barack Obama, facing a new foreign policy crisis less than two months before seeking re-election, has vowed to bring to justice those responsible for the Benghazi attack.
Four people have so far been arrested over that incident, Libyan authorities said.
A security source told NBC News on Friday that a 48-hour no-fly zone had been imposed over Benghazi in the wake of the consulate attack. The restrictions were believed to be put in place late Thursday night or early Friday local time.
Sanaa resident: 'It is a dangerous situation'
In the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, where anti-U.S. protesters attacked the guard offices outside the main embassy building on Thursday, security forces on Friday blocked the streets surrounding the U.S. mission as demonstrators gathered nearby.
Around 20 to 30 people stood in a road to the north of the embassy, carrying signs saying "Anything but the Messenger of God," a Reuters witness said.
NYT: Egypt leaders caught in the middle in anti-US protests
A security source told Reuters that at least 15 people were wounded, some by gunfire, in Sanaa on Thursday before the government ringed the area with troops.
Security forces faced violent protests in Egypt and Yemen spurred by angry mobs accusing the U.S. of insulting the prophet Mohammad. NBC's Richard Engel reports.
No U.S. embassy staff were hurt. Yemen's President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi condemned the attack and said Yemen would be launching an investigation.
Why films and cartoons of Muhammad spark violence
The embassy in Yemen told U.S. citizens it expected more protests against the film and that it would be closing its consular services on Saturday.
"U.S. Embassy Sanaa informs U.S. citizens of continued demonstrations in the vicinity of the embassy, and the security situation remains fluid," the embassy said in a statement posted on its website late Thursday.
The U.S. Embassy is closed on Thursdays and Fridays, which are not working days in Yemen.
Residents living nearby said they feared more violent protests after Friday prayers.
"It is a dangerous situation," one Sanaa resident told Reuters. "I cannot wait until the morning to move my family to another neighborhood until the situation is totally calm."
At least 224 people were injured in protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Thursday, the BBC reported.
Earlier this week, angry young men scaled the walls of the building and tore down and burned the American flag there.
Man behind anti-Islam movie ID'd as Egypt-born ex-con
Libyan leader Mohammed Magarief and Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi both apologized to the United States over the attacks and Egypt's Islamist president, Muhammad Morsi, condemned them on television while also rejecting any "insult to the prophet."
Morsi, a member of Muslim Brotherhood who became the country's first democratically-elected president earlier this year, may face?the sternest challenge of all: How to retain the support of Egypt's Islamists by condemning the video,?while not alienating Washington, which continues to provide massive economic aid to Egypt.?

Zoubeir Souissi / Reuters
Protests that led to the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador in Libya and three other Americans at the consulate in Benghazi spread across the region, ignited by a controversial film that ridicules Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
Many Muslim states focused their condemnation on the film and will be concerned about preventing a repeat of the fallout seen after publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. That touched off riots in the Middle East, Africa and Asia in 2006 in which at least 50 people were killed.
Protests spread
About 200 demonstrators gathered Friday outside the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and hoisted banners.
In Bangladesh, Islamists tried to march on the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka, and Iranian students protested in Tehran. Earlier in the week, there were protests outside U.S. missions in Tunisia, Morocco and Sudan and state-backed Islamic scholars in Sudan have called a mass protest after Friday prayers.
In Nigeria, the government put police on high alert and stepped up security around all foreign missions, also fearing an Islamist backlash, possibly after Friday prayers.
Libya arrests 4 suspected in deadly US consulate attack
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has appealed to Afghan leaders for help in "maintaining calm."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday Washington had nothing to do with the crudely made film posted on the Internet, which she called "disgusting and reprehensible."
Officials said Thursday that President Obama doesn't intend to downgrade Egypt, which gets $1.5 billion a year in U.S. aid. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.
The amateurish production, entitled the "Innocence of Muslims," and originating in the United States, portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, a homosexual and a child abuser.
For many Muslims, any depiction of the prophet is blasphemous and caricatures or other characterizations have in the past provoked violent protests across the Muslim world.
U.S. officials sought to distinguish the anti-American protests from the Arab Spring revolutions that ousted long-time strongmen in Egypt, Libya and Yemen; Obama backed those demonstrations.
"We see this now as principally tied to this video and those in the regions who are seeking to exploit it," a senior administration official said, according to The Associated Press.
Actors and the assistant director of the film "Innocence of Muslims" told NBC News that the original spoken lines in the screenplay were dubbed over without their knowledge. NBC's Mike Taibbi reports.
US victims identified
U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens was killed Tuesday during a protest against the film when Islamists armed with guns, mortars and grenades staged military-style assaults on the Benghazi mission.
A Libyan doctor said Stevens died of smoke inhalation. U.S. information technology specialist and Air Force veteran Sean Smith also died at the consulate, while two other Americans were killed when a squad of security personnel sent by helicopter from Tripoli to rescue diplomats from a safe house came under mortar attack.
Clinton identified the two as Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, former Navy SEALS who died trying to protect their colleagues.
In a statement, she said both Woods and Doherty had lengthy experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. It did not say in what capacity they were working in Benghazi.
Two killed in Libyan consulate attack identified as ex-Navy SEALs
In an interview with ABC News last month, Doherty, 42, said he was working with the State Department on an intelligence mission to round up and destroy shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemns violence in response to the "disgusting and reprehensible" anti-Islam film that has sparked outrage across the Mideast and addresses demands for the U.S. to censor the video.
Thousand of those missiles disappeared in Libya after Moammar Gadhafi's overthrow by in a Western-backed uprising last year, prompting concerns they could end up in the hands of al-Qaida militants.
Timeline: Political fallout from the attack on diplomats in Libya
The U.S. military has dispatched two destroyers toward the Libyan coast, in what an official said was a move to give the administration flexibility for any future action. The USS Laboon, was already in position and the other destroyer, the USS McFaul, was at least a day away, a U.S. official said.
The U.S. military also sent a Marine Corps anti-terrorist team to boost security in Libya.
NBC News staff, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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