BAGHDAD — For a second day, demonstrators swarmed outside the United States Embassy in Iraq on Wednesday and troops fired tear gas in an attempt to disperse them, but after a few hours the militia leaders who had organized the demonstration called on the crowd to leave.
Unlike on Tuesday, protesters did not get inside the compound. By midafternoon all but about 200 had dispersed, taking their tent poles with them.
President Trump said on Tuesday that Iran was responsible for events at the embassy compound in Baghdad, and tweeted, “They will pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat.”
That drew a taunting response on Wednesday from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. “You can’t do anything,” he said in a speech in Tehran, according to his website, adding: “If the Islamic Republic decides to challenge and fight, it will do so unequivocally.”
The situation in Iraq reached a new level of volatility in the last few days as Iran and the United States attacked each other’s forces, in an escalation of hostilities that was at risk of spiraling out of control. The growing confrontations between the United States and Iran, the two main sponsors of the fragile Iraqi government and the two primary foreign military powers there, makes the already unstable region even more so.
Protesters entered
the compound
at this gate.
They burned a
reception building
and guard posts.
Al Kindi St.
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ZONE
U.S. Embassy
compound
Protesters entered
the Green Zone
from this bridge.
Tigris River
GREEN
ZONE
Protesters
entered the
compound
at this gate.
They burned a
reception building
and guard posts.
Al Kindi St.
U.S. Embassy
compound
Protesters entered
the Green Zone
from this bridge.
Tigris
River
TIGRIS RIVER
BAGHDAD
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TIGRIS RIVER
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The United States blamed an Iranian-backed militia for a rocket attack on Friday on an Iraqi military base, which killed an American contractor and wounded several other people. American forces responded on Sunday with strikes on five sites controlled by the militia, in Syria and Iraq, that killed at least two dozen people and injured twice as many; Iran has put the death toll at 31.
On Tuesday, thousands of Iraqis, many of them militia fighters, marched on the United States embassy compound in Baghdad to protest the American strikes; some of them forced their way through the outer wall, set fires and threw rocks. They did not attempt to breach the embassy itself, and there were no reports of serious injuries, but the clash evoked memories of the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
In an ominous sign for the Americans’ ability to stay, the Iraqi authorities, who had prevented previous demonstrations from getting near the embassy compound, allowed the protesters on Tuesday to march on it unimpeded.
Militia leaders vowed that they would not go away, but would stage a sit-in just outside the compound until the United States withdrew from Iraq. Were the Americans to do so, they would strengthen Iran’s hand in a country where it already wields significant power.
But on Wednesday afternoon, the umbrella group for the militias, the Popular Mobilization Forces, ordered everyone to leave the embassy area.
The number of protesters on the street outside the compound on Wednesday was about 1,000, much smaller than it had been on Tuesday, but the situation remained combustible.
Iraqi special forces charged with protecting the embassy were relatively few in number, about 30 men. They were caught between the demonstrators and American troops, and exposed to the tear gas fired by United States forces at the protesters who attempted to climb onto the roof of the guard post — damaged by fire on Tuesday — and jump inside the compound.
At about midday, as more protesters clambered on to the roof, the Americans fired at least four volleys of tear gas, driving several hundred demonstrators back from the compound’s front gate, but a larger number remained.
A general with the Iraqi security forces, who asked not to be quoted by name, stood with his men next to the perimeter walls as protesters tried to scale them.
“This is not good — they have to stay away from the wall,” he said. The Americans, he added, “are right when they fire tear gas because otherwise the protesters will get inside the compound, but we are caught in between.”
“What can we do?” he asked.
In the past months, in the face of antigovernment protests, it was Iraqi forces firing tear gas to dispel protesters. But this week, the Iraqi authorities have left that to the United States, rather than confronting their own people.
Mr. Khamenei, addressing Mr. Trump, said, “If you were logical — which you’re not — you would see that your crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan” and elsewhere “have made nations hate you,” the ayatollah’s website reported.
Iraqi militias — in theory under the umbrella of the national military, but often quite independent — played a major role in the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS. While many of the armed groups, who are made up of Shiite Muslims, are backed by Iran, a Shiite theocracy at odds with the United States, the two powers had a common goal in their effort to defeat the Islamic State. Once the Islamic State was largely demolished, however, the Iran-backed Iraqi militias turned their attention to constraining United States activities in Iraq, especially after America ratcheted up its sanctions against Iran.
Mr. Khamenei said the United States was “taking revenge on the Popular Mobilization Forces for defeating ISIS,” a group that he claimed “the U.S. had created.”
The militia that the United States struck on Sunday, Khataib Hezbollah, denied responsibility on Wednesday for the most confrontational demonstrators, although it had pushed for protests in front of the embassy.
When asked why the protesters were climbing on the roof and setting fires anew, a spokesman for the group, Mohammed Muhi, said: “We can’t control those people and I think you heard me say over the loudspeakers: ‘Don’t go deeply, don’t burn.’ Our message is to stay here and have a sit-in, but they didn’t listen to me, so what can I do?”
There are about 30 groups within the Popular Mobilization Forces, each answering to different leaders who do not always agree with each other. Neither the government nor any of the factions has the authority to corral all of them, making for a dangerous mix.
Falih Hassan reported from Baghdad, and Alissa Rubin from Paris.
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