From Northern Africa to Indonesia, protesters ? sparked by outrage over an anti-Islam film produced in the U.S. ? march in sometimes violent demonstrations. NBC's Jim Maceda reports and msnbc's Rula Jebreal and TIME's Bobby Ghosh offer analysis.
By NBC News staff and wire reports
Updated at 1:35 p.m. ET:?U.S. and other Western interests were targeted by angry crowds across much of the Muslim world Friday as rage spread over an anti-Islamic video produced in California.
The unrest has been mostly directed at U.S. embassies, but other targets also came under attack, including:
- British and German embassies in Sudan.
- A KFC restaurant in Lebanon.
- The U.N. multinational peacekeeping observer mission in the Sinai Peninsula.
See the latest on this story at BreakingNews.com
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A building housing a Hardee's and a Kentucky Fried Chicken burns Friday in Tripoli, Lebanon, after protesters set it ablaze during anti-Western protests.
U.S. embassies and consulates had been braced for trouble on the Muslim day of prayer, when demonstrations are often held, following the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Triggered by a crude, provocative anti-Islam video made by religious activists in the U.S.?and uploaded to YouTube, angry protests by Muslims have been directed primarily at a number of U.S. diplomatic missions this week.
Man behind anti-Islam movie ID'd as Egypt-born ex-con
President Barack Obama has ordered a security review for U.S. diplomatic facilities worldwide, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday.
Clashes in Cairo
In Egypt on Friday, stones were hurled at police near the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. "God is greatest" and "There is no god but God," one group chanted as police in riot gear fired tear gas and threw stones back at them in a street leading to the fortified U.S. Embassy.
Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist who is Egypt's first freely elected president, is having to strike a delicate balance, protecting the embassy of a major donor while also showing a robust response over the video.
"What happened a few days ago was a pernicious attempt to insult the Prophet Muhammad. It is something we reject and Egypt stands against. We will not permit that these acts are carried out," Morsi said?during a visit to Italy.
"We cannot accept the killing of innocent people nor attacks on embassies. We must defend diplomats and tourists who come to visit our country. Killing people is forbidden ... by our faith," he said.
NBC's Richard Engel in Egypt and NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin in Libya report on what might have triggered recent attacks on American facilities and U.S. history in the Middle East.
The Muslim Brotherhood said on Twitter that it was canceling its call for nationwide protests about the film. However, it said it would still be present in Cairo's central Tahrir Square "for a symbolic protest against the movie."
Morsi was the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate in June's presidential elections, which were the country's first after popular protests helped force out longtime U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Cairo protesters have clashed with police daily since Tuesday, when angry young men scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy and tore down and burned the U.S. flag, replacing it with a black Islamist one.
While the violence in Egypt, which is heavily subsidized by the U.S., may prove to be the most politically significant, clashes and anti-U.S. demonstrations broke out Friday in number of Muslim countries:
About 50 U.S. Marines have been sent to Yemen to provide additional security in the aftermath of Thursday's attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Defense Department officials told NBC News. The Marines, part of a Fleet Anti-Terror Security Team, are an identical unit to the one sent to Libya earlier this week.
Security forces fired warning shots and used water cannons Friday against hundreds of protesters near the U.S. outpost in Sanaa.
NYT: Egypt leaders caught in the middle in anti-US protests
The embassy told U.S. citizens that it expected more protests against the film. "The security situation remains fluid," it said in a statement posted on its website. No embassy workers were injured.
In Libya, a 48-hour no-fly zone was imposed over Benghazi in the wake of Tuesday's consulate attack, but it was later lifted.
Libyan officials said Thursday night that four people had been arrested over the killings of the Americans. 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.
Officials in Libya say they have arrested four suspects in connection to the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in which U.S. ambassador Stevens and three embassy staff were killed. NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin reports from Tripoli.
In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began in January 2011, a large cloud of black smoke rose around the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, where stone-throwing protesters and police waged a pitched battle. Angry demonstrators set fires to trees and smashed windows inside the embassy compound.
Later, demonstrators set fire to the American School in Tunis, which was closed Friday, Reuters said.
In Sudan, protesters clambered over the walls of the compound of the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum on Friday, prompting embassy guards to fire warning shots, a Reuters witness said.
Earlier, thousands of demonstrators trying to storm the British and German embassies clashed with police. Witnesses told Reuters that protesters got into the German Embassy, taking down the German flag and raising an Islamic one in its place.
Protesters clash with security forces after setting a fire at the German Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, on Friday.
Sudan's Foreign Ministry has criticized Germany for having allowed a protest last month by right-wing activists carrying caricatures of Muhammad and for Chancellor Angela Merkel's having given an award in 2010 to a Danish cartoonist whose depictions of the prophet in 2005 triggered protests across the Islamic world.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has faced pressure from Islamists who feel the government has given up the religious values of his 1989 Islamist coup.
The UN multi-national peacekeeping observer mission in the Sinai Peninsula has been attacked by a group of "anti-film" protestors. Initial reports suggest the watch tower has been set on fire. No reports of casualties. The multinational force observes the compliance of the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.?
In Lebanon, where Pope Benedict XVI arrived Friday for a three-day visit, hundreds of people set light to a KFC restaurant in the northern city of Tripoli, witnesses said.
Residents watching the attack said some people were shouting "We don't want the pope" and "No more insults (to Islam)."
At least one person was killed and 25 others were wounded in those protests, Lebanese officials said.
Why films and cartoons of Muhammad spark violence
In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, about 200 protesters vented their anger by chanting "death to Jews!" and "death to America!" in a largely peaceful protest outside the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy in Jakarta.
In Pakistan, protests cropped up in major cities such as Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, but Friday prayers seemed to have passed without major incidents of violence, NBC News reported.
About 200 demonstrators gathered Friday outside the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and hoisted banners.
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.
In Bangladesh, Islamists tried to march on the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka, and Iranian students protested in Tehran.
In Nigeria, where the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram has killed hundreds of people this year in an insurgency, the government put police on alert and stepped up security around foreign missions.
Protesters in Afghanistan set fire to an effigy of Obama and burned a U.S. flag after Friday prayers in the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that Washington had nothing to do with the crudely made film posted on the Internet, which she called "disgusting and reprehensible."
The amateurish production, titled "Innocence of Muslims" and originating in the U.S., portrays 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.
Protests follow Arab Spring changes
U.S. officials sought to distinguish the anti-U.S. protests from the Arab Spring revolutions that ousted longtime 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.
But as the protests against the pope in Lebanon and British and German interests in Sudan suggested, the anger seemed to go beyond merely the video and the U.S.
NBC's Richard Engel reports from Cairo, Egypt, where protesters, outraged over an anti-Islam video, continue to participate in violent demonstrations near the U.S. Embassy.
Ambassador 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.
Information technology specialist Sean Smith, an Air Force veteran,?also died at the consulate, while two other Americans were killed when a squad of security personnel sent 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.
Obama and Clinton were attending attending the return of the remains of the four Americans at Joint Base Andrews in suburban Maryland on Friday afternoon, the White House said.
NBC News staff, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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