Operations and staff at the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad were relocated temporarily on Friday to Stockholm after it was stormed by protesters. In a statement, Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Tobias Billström said:

At 2 am this morning local time, violent protesters stormed the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad. The Embassy office was occupied, vandalised and set on fire.

A similar incident occurred less than a month ago. What has happened is unacceptable and the Government condemns these attacks in the strongest possible terms.

Billström stressed that host countries have an obligation to protect diplomatic missions, saying “it is clear that the Iraqi authorities have failed to fulfill this obligation” Sweden’s government summoned the Iraqi Chargé d’Affaires and expressed their “dismay” to Iraqi authorities.

This comes after Iraq expelled the Sweden’s Ambassador on Thursday in protest of a planned burning of the Koran in Stockholm. The Koran-burning prompted hundreds of protesters to storm and set ablaze the Swedish embassy in the Iraqi capital. The US, UK and EU also condemned the attack on the embassy. 

Tensions between Sweden and Iraq have been high in recent weeks after protestors in Sweden kicked and partially destroyed a book they said was the Koran, Islam’s holy book, outside the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm on Thursday. A former Iraqi citizen also burned a Koran in front of a Stockholm mosque during Eid-Al-Adha celebrations. The Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) previously called a meeting to explore possible joint actions to respond to such events.