Beginning at 12:00 p.m. on 21 November 1979, a large mob of Pakistani citizens violently stormed the Embassy of the United States in Islamabad and subsequently burned it down in a coordinated attack. The riot was led by local Islamists aligned with the right-wing Pakistani political party Jamaat-i-Islami, and the mob primarily comprised students from Quaid-i-Azam University. Lasting for almost 24 hours, the riot had been incited by Iranian religious cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, who was leading the Islamic Revolution at the time, after he falsely claimed in a widespread Iranian radio broadcast that the then-ongoing Grand Mosque seizure in Saudi Arabia had been orchestrated by the United States and Israel, prompting many anti-American riots throughout the Muslim world. During the attack, the Pakistani rioters took several American diplomats as hostages with the intent of carrying out sham trials and public executions. In addition to Islamabad, there were similarly large riots in Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, where a number of American cultural centres were attacked and burned down.Four embassy personnel were killed in the attack: a U.S. Marine Security Guard, a U.S. Army warrant officer, and two local Pakistani employees. The American ambassador Arthur W. Hummel Jr. was outside of the embassy at the time of the attack and therefore was able to escape from the rioters before being harmed. Shortly after the riots began, American president Jimmy Carter contacted Pakistani president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq by phone to warn him against allowing the embassy employees' safety to be compromised. However, Zia proved reluctant to dispatch troops to disperse the crowd. By the morning of 22 November, the Pakistan Army moved in to retake the embassy grounds: two of the rioting students were killed and as many as 70 additional rioters were injured. According to witnesses at the nearby British High Commission, well over 1,500 people took part in the attack on the embassy.
The burning of the embassy in Islamabad played into Khomeini's Islamic Revolution export propaganda amidst the Iran hostage crisis, and Khomeini himself later publicly praised the Pakistani rioters' actions after hearing about the attack. Zia condemned the embassy burning as "not in keeping with lofty Islamic traditions" while refraining from overtly criticizing Jamaat-i-Islami, which had been a political ally in his Islamization of Pakistan.
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