Protests Mark War Anniversary

About 100 protesters marched on the U.S. Embassy in the Philippine capital today to demand Washington pull out troops from Iraq, joining demonstrators worldwide in marking the war’s third anniversary.

Members of a left-wing coalition called Iraq Solidarity Campaign carried placards saying, “End the U.S. occupation of Iraq.”

The same message was delivered by hundreds of thousands of peace activists in Asia, Europe and the United States over the weekend.

Some solemn, others noisy, many of the protests drew smaller than anticipated crowds that fell far short of the millions who protested the Iraq invasion in March 2003 and the first anniversary in 2004.

Antiwar protests Sunday included a rally in Seoul, where 1,000 demonstrators urged the South Korean government to bring their troops home.

In Malaysia’s largest city, Kuala Lumpur, about 600 people protested peacefully, and in Tokyo, about 800 demonstrators took to the streets, after about 2,000 protested a day earlier.

Hundreds of antiwar protesters marched silently and carried symbolic caskets through the capital of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory in the Caribbean.

The march Sunday was led by the families of Puerto Rican soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dressed in black and marching behind the families, demonstrators carried 49 caskets, representing the number of soldiers from the island who have been killed in the two countries.

“We wanted to do something simple, something so simple and solemn as a funeral march through our towns,” said Wanda Colon, a spokeswoman for the coalition of more than 30 community groups that organized the march.