Most U.S. government workers, families evacuated from Tunisia, Sudan

Megaryef said “a few” of those who joined in the attack were foreigners, who had entered Libya “from different directions, some of them definitely from Mali and Algeria.”

“The others are affiliates and maybe sympathizers,” he added.

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The State Department has ordered the departure of all family members and non-essential U.S. government personnel from posts in Sudan and Tunisia. It has also issued travel warnings for both countries.

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Muslim protests around the world

As the administration continued to reach out aggressively to its allies and partners in the region and beyond, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke by telephone Saturday with the leaders or foreign ministers of Britain, Libya, Egypt, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Somalia, the State Department said.

In Egypt, after days of pressure from the United States, President Mohamed Morsi took decisive action Saturday against lingering protests near the U.S. Embassy, with police making arrests and clearing Tahrir Square of demonstrations whose cause Morsi had only days earlier endorsed. But he had to contend with continued pressure from ultraconservative Muslims and disaffected young people who had fought for days near the embassy.

Morsi had been in the middle of negotiating more than $1 billion in aid, debt forgiveness and U.S. investments when protesters, prodded by rage over the obscure anti-Islam video that was made in the United States, stormed the embassy walls and pulled down and destroyed the American flag. The assistance talks have been subsumed by the days of protests near the embassy – some of which were called for by Morsi’s own Muslim Brotherhood party.

But it is the once-repressed, ultra­conservative Salafists who have proved the most complicated for Morsi to handle as he navigates his nation of 83 million people through a democratic transition that has freed citizens to be as religiously conservative and anti-American as they wish. The Salafist Nour party was one of the main sparks of the Tuesday protests in Cairo that presaged the regional conflagration, although Nour backed off when the situation turned violent and endorsed Saturday’s sweep of Tahrir.

The Salafists’ first taste of political power is toning down their rhetoric, some experts say. Salafists helped form a human chain in Tahrir Square on Friday to keep the most violent protesters away from security forces.

Divisions in Egypt

But for Morsi, attending to religious conservatives in the country will be a major consideration as his term unfolds.

“Now Salafists are calling him out and saying that he isn’t the most fervent defender of the faith,” said Shadi Hamid, an Egypt expert at the Brookings Doha Center. “That puts him in a bind.”

Salafists who were long repressed under President Hosni Mubarak are now able to follow their strict faith openly. And after the revolution, many Salafists turned to politics after years of assiduously avoiding it. They were the second-largest bloc after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party in the now-dissolved parliament.

Though Salafists are a diffuse coalition, Morsi and his associates view them as major contenders.

“It’s a bigger group than the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s much bigger,” said a Freedom and Justice Party official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss party strategy. “If we have access to 5 million members, they probably have access to 30 million people. The difference is huge.”