What happens if an embassy is attacked

Diplomats who represent their country abroad enjoy diplomatic immunity. This protects them against prosecution in the receiving state for the entire period in which they hold their diplomatic post.

The international agreements on diplomatic immunity can be found in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. For instance, the receiving state is not permitted to prosecute diplomats, and must protect them, along with their families and property.

The main aim of the Convention is to allow diplomats to carry out their work without hindrance in the receiving state. These agreements are vital to international relations.

Diplomats attempt to ensure that relations between countries run as smoothly as possible. This sometimes means that they have to raise difficult issues in a direct manner. It was the first of three days of mourning declared by Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, who was furious that the Americans had killed members of the Popular Mobilization Forces that were technically under his control.

That force, comprising more than a dozen mostly Shia militia groups, had been key to turning the tide against the Islamic State, which follows a violent, apocalyptic version of Sunni Islam. Roughly a third of the Shia groups were advised and supplied by Iran, which also cultivated a close relationship with the storied ISIS-fighting Iraqi militia commander Gen. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Administration and military officials, speaking anonymously to discuss intelligence intercepts of militia communications with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It seemed obvious to the Diplomatic Security agents that the militia members had carefully plotted out the attack. Tsurumi, a former New York city paramedic and Navy corpsman, saw thousands gathered outside, some carrying flags and a few carrying weapons.

It was a strategic target that U. Every agent and security force member defending the main gates that day got hit by some sort of flying projectile—chunks of brick or pavement the protestors dug out of the road outside the embassy, or baseball-sized rocks the rioters apparently brought with them from outside the international zone. The agents operated on the assumption that the protestors planned to storm the compound.

Embassy in Tehran when Iranian students took 98 Americans hostage. After attacking the fuel farm, the protestors moved down the embassy perimeter to their next target: the northeastern entrance, known formally as the Red gate, one of three entrances they would attack that day.

Huey and Ross ran from the fuel farm blaze to join them, as did Tsurumi. They managed to force the first wave back out into the street, but a second surge of about 50 protestors soon forced their way in. Huey was concerned his team was about to be overrun — and if that happened, he worried that the security team on the embassy buildings above would make the call to use lethal force, which he feared would draw fire from armed militiamen he had spotted in the street, who had been careful not to approach the embassy compound.

They were trying to get the militia members out of the compound. That was in the first hour of what was to become a day-long melee, with the protestors besieging the embassy gates in coordinated waves.

Fifty or so protesters would surge at the gate and then fall back, replaced by 50 more, according to a senior security official who was monitoring the protest from the base across the street, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Diplomatic Security agents were eventually able to force the gates shut. Pushed back outside the compound walls of the Red gate, the protestors moved down to street to two other gates, the Blue and Consular entrances, destroying their reception buildings, then using a metal roof from a sun shelter outside as a ramp to climb over the wall.

The embassy staff inside those small, fortified reception buildings had already cleared out sensitive documents and evacuated. At these other two gates, the protestors did not make it inside the embassy compound in the same numbers as at the Red gate, but they kept trying for hours. The rioters kept throwing Molotov cocktails over the wall where a number of embassy vehicles were parked, so Mackenzie, who had joined the fight at the Red gate, scrambled to find keys to the flaming vehicles, jump into them, and drive them away from the walls in order to put the fires out.

That violent first hour had shaken them all. In Virginia, Michael Evanoff , the then-head of Diplomatic Security, first got the call at his home a bit past three in the morning — around 10 a.

Iraq time — just as the marchers were being allowed to cross the bridge and approach the embassy. He drove straight to the Diplomatic Security command center in Rosslyn, Va. Evanoff and his team had planned for years on how to avoid repeating a Benghazi-style disaster, and this would be their test. They had beefed up multiple layers of security inside the Baghdad embassy, as they had at other high-threat posts, adding a U.

Marine Air Ground Task Force team in addition to the Marines who regularly protect embassies and the classified material inside. They drilled constantly on what to do if an embassy was overrun. The DSS works with the US Marine Corps and local security forces in host countries to create custom security plans for each embassy and consulate. It folds its lessons into the training curriculum provided for its 2, armed, federally sworn special agents at its new Foreign Affairs Security Training Center, which we visited just before its opening in November in Blackstone, Virginia.

It also conducts drills at each embassy—one of which I observed during a visit to the US embassy in Dakar, Senegal, in The embassy ran a simulation of a protest and attack that appeared similar to the one in Baghdad on Tuesday.

Attacks on US diplomatic facilities are not new. Past assaults on US embassies and consulates in Tehran in , Nairobi in , and Benghazi, Libya, in led to massive changes in embassy design, security strategies, and training protocols for the special agents charged with protecting US diplomatic presences abroad. The Nairobi bombing, for instance, prompted the US to move embassies to larger tracts of land with significant space between perimeter fences and the buildings themselves.

Bomb-proof windows and vehicle barricades are now de rigueur at US facilities everywhere. The DSS deploys its special agents to almost embassies and consulates globally, in addition to facilities in the United States. It has 45, additional personnel. They secure the physical structures but also prepare for threats away from those compounds, including ensuring personnel have secure safe rooms, instructions on how to respond to threats, and persistent communication to security teams.

That said, the damage was contained to the front-line reception area, which sits across a compound at a distance from the embassy building itself.