Iraq Feature: The Collapse of the "Kurdish Spring" (Peterson)

Photo: Shwan Mohammed (AFP/Getty Images)Tucked away in an often-overlooked arc of northern Iraq, Kurds launched their "Kurdish Spring" simply enough in mid-February, in solidarity with Tunisians and Egyptians who had toppled dictatorial rulers. 

But the result here was very different, and hardly looked like an unfolding of freedom. Washington’s close Kurdish allies cracked down hard. After 62 days of street protests, 10 people were dead. The carefully crafted image of Kurdistan as a democratic island in an ocean of regional dictatorship was in tatters.

All that visibly remains of the uprising are a few faded posters of its first victim --- a 16-year-old --- and scorch marks where security forces burned the tents of protesters. But it has deepened the political crisis in this semiautonomous region of northern Iraq.

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Iraq Feature: Protests Transform Kurdistan (Abdulla)

Protests sweeping North Africa and the Middle East have transformed Iraq's Kurdish region, where an angry public is awakening to political life beyond the authoritarian leaders once seen as heroic liberators. 

In other parts of Iraq, protests inspired by the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have tapered off over the past month.

In Kurdistan, where two political parties have jointly dominated public life for two decades, demonstrators have remained steadfast, camping out for more than a month in a square in the region's second-largest city, Sulaimaniya.

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Iraq Feature: The Protests in Kurdistan (Salih)

The winds of change sweeping through the Middle East and North Africa have now reached an otherwise peaceful corner of northern Iraq. Nowhere is their arrival more visible than in Bardarki Sara, the central square of Sulaimaniya, which has turned into a venue for mass protests against the authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Inspired by the protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the protesters have renamed their square "Maydani Azadi", the Kurdish equivalent of Tahrir or Liberation Square.

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