Staff at the Swedish embassy in Baghdad are “safe”, Sweden’s foreign ministry told AFP on Thursday after the building was set on fire. The Swedish embassy in the Iraqi capital was set on fire at dawn on Thursday during a demonstration organized by supporters of flamboyant religious leader Moqtada Sadr ahead of a new event in Sweden that will see a copy of the Koran burned.

“We are aware of the situation. Our embassy staff (in Iraq) are safe and the ministry is in regular contact with them,” the ministry said in an email after the incidents in Baghdad.

“The Iraqi authorities are responsible for the protection of diplomatic missions and their personnel,” the ministry added, stressing that attacks on embassies and diplomats “are a serious violation of the Vienna Convention.”

The ministry declined to confirm whether the events were related to a planned rally in front of the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm on Thursday from 11:00 to 13:00 GMT, during which organizers plan to burn the Koran and the Iraqi flag.

Smoke billowed from the Swedish embassy building, an AFP correspondent could see on the roof of a building next door, where a large force of Iraqi special forces was deployed outside and dozens of demonstrators were still at the scene.

It was not immediately clear whether the embassy was empty at the time of the attack and whether its staff had been evacuated. Neither the Iraqi security forces nor the authorities reacted to the incident immediately.

The attack on the Baghdad embassy came as Swedish police sanctioned a mini-rally on Thursday in front of the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm, where an organizer planned to set fire to a copy of the Koran and an Iraqi flag.

“I didn’t wait for the morning, I entered at dawn, I set fire to the Swedish embassy,” a young protester in Baghdad told AFP on Thursday, before chanting “Moqtada, Moqtada Moqtada”, the name of an influential religious leader. .

A protester, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the “kids of the sadist movement” were acting after Salwan Momika was again allowed to “burn the Koran in a demonstration” in Sweden.

Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee in Sweden – the same one who organized Thursday’s rally – burned several pages of the Koran in front of Stockholm’s largest mosque on June 28, the day of Eid al-Adha, a holiday celebrated by all Muslims.

This first incident led supporters of Moqtada Sadr, an influential religious leader and troublemaker in Iraqi politics, to storm the Swedish embassy in Baghdad on June 29.