Battle Lines Harden Across the Mideast

NYTimes, Security forces and government supporters attacked protesters on Friday — using tear gas, batons, shotguns and grenades — in pitched street battles in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen.

The clashes followed a week of deepening unrest as protesters, emboldened by the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, have called for swift revolutions in their own countries. The battle lines between protesters and authoritarian rulers across the Arab world appeared to be hardening with governments turning to an increasingly brutal script in trying to quash the protests that have swept the region.

The severity of a Libyan crackdown on its so-called Day of Rage began to emerge Friday when a human rights advocacy group said 24 people had been killed by gunfire on Thursday and news reports said further clashes with security forces were feared at the funerals for the dead.

That apprehension also seized Bahrain, where mourners for some of the five people killed in an assault on a democracy camp a day earlier marched on Pearl Square and were fired on by security forces. The violence has pitted a Sunni minority government against a Shiite majority in the strategic island state that is home to the American Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

In the Bahraini village of Sitra, south of Manama, thousands of Shiites gathered for more funerals of slain protesters, chanting “The people want the fall of the government” before noon prayers. No security forces were reported in the area, The Associated Press said.

In Yemen protests appeared to grow larger and more violent in the city of Taiz, 130 miles south of the capital, where thousands of protesters called for the ouster of President Ali Abullah Saleh and clashed with government supporters, news reports said. Reuters reported that a grenade exploded in a large crowd of protesters who had camped out since last Friday in the city’s Hurriya Square, killing at least one person and wounding many more.

Across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen thousands of demonstrators gathered on Friday in the tiny African nation of Djibouti to demand that the country’s president step down, after a series of smaller demonstrations seeking to capitalize on the wave of unrest, The Associated Press reported. A former French colony and a strong ally of the United States, Djibouti, like Bahrain, plays host to an American military base, the only one in Africa.

President Obama condemned the attacks on protesters around the region. “I am deeply concerned by reports of violence in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on Friday. “The United States condemns the use of violence against peaceful protesters in those countries, and wherever else it may occur.”

Clashes between pro- and antigovernment demonstrators were reported in Amman, the capital of Jordan, The Associated Press reported. And in Kuwait, the police attacked about 1,000 members of the group known as bedouns who had gathered to demand greater rights, Bloomberg reported.

In Egypt the ouster of Mr. Mubarak has not ended disruptions. In a sermon delivered to hundreds of thousands gathered in Tahrir Sqaure and televised around the Middle East, Yousef al-Qaradawi, perhaps the most influential cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, urged Egyptians to guard the achievements of their own revolution and warned Arab rulers that they were facing a revolt without precedent.

“Don’t fight history,” Mr. Qaradawi said. “You can’t delay the day when it starts. The Arab world has changed.”

Mr. Qaradawi, who returned Thursday night from three decades in exile, spoke at a combination victory rally and democracy demonstration that brought hundreds of thousands of Egyptians back to the epicenter of the revolution that toppled Mr. Mubarak. State television, which until Mr. Mubarak’s departure last Friday had consistently belittled the crowds in the square, put attendance at two million.

“The people want to build a new regime” and “the people want to cleanse the system” they chanted, updating the slogans of the revolt.

Speakers and demonstrators expressed an anxious optimism. Many said they had come to celebrate their achievement and remember those who had died in the protests. Many carried signs with pictures of the “martyrs,” and vendors sold plastics emblazoned with them as well.

But they also said they had come to pressure the military officers now ruling the country to deliver on its promises of a transition to democracy, beginning with the release of political prisoners and the repeal of the so-called emergency law allowing extra-legal detentions.

Mr. Qaradawi, a popular television preacher as well as an influential theologian, echoed those calls, urging the military rulers to remove the cabinet ministers held over from the Mubarak government. “I say to the youth, protect the revolution and protect its unity,” he said. “Beware of those who want to divide our ranks and those who want to corrupt your brotherhood.”

Mr. Qaradawi’s return is likely to worry some in the West because of his past support for violence against Israel and the American forces in Iraq. He has sometimes served as a de facto spiritual leader for the Muslim Brotherhood, the most organized opposition group under the Mubarak government.

But he also used his sermon Friday to call for tolerance and peace between Muslims and Christians in Egypt, and many in the crowd carried signs emblazoned with a crescent and a cross — the symbol of interfaith solidarity here.

In another turn of events likely to provoke the anxiety of the West about the potential consequences of Egypt’s revolution, the government of Egypt granted permission to two Iranian warships to pass through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, officials said. No Iranian warship has traversed the canal since Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and some in the Israeli government called the Iranian move an act of provocation.

J. David Goodman from New York. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris; David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo; and Michael Slackman from Manama, Bahrain.