Sulaimaniya protesters call for removing Gaddafi’s name from street

SULAIMANIYA / IraqiNews.com: The name of Moammar Gaddafi street will be changed upon a request from protesters in Sulaimaniya after the violence practiced by the Libyan government against citizens calling for their rights, according to a local official in the Kurdish city on Thursday. “Demonstrators gathering at al-Saray square, central Sulaimaniya, demanded changing the name of Gaddafi street in the city due to the violence practiced by Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s government against protesters calling for the rights. The Sulaimaniya municipality chief today (Feb. 24) decided orally to change the street name with a new one,” the municipality’s media spokesman, Zaradisht Tawfiq, told IraqiNews.com news agency. The street in question was named years ago after Libyan leader Gaddafi in appreciation of his earlier position supportive of the Kurdish people and their rights to self-determination like any other people. The position was considered by many Kurds as a rare one worthy of appreciation by an Arab leader. Gaddafi’s resort to violence against tens of thousands of Libyans demanding regime change, political reforms, freedom and justice, however, stirred the Kurdish people’s anger and prompted them to sympathize with the Libyans’ upheaval against injustice and condemn the Libyan regime’s crimes. Sulaimaniya, 346 km northeast of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, has been witnessing mass protests for six days now. Dozens of clerics and members of parliament from opposition parties have joined the demonstrations that call for political and socio-economic reforms. A number of protesters were killed and more than 50 others wounded in the wave of protests after some of them came under fire from inside Iraqi Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) headquarters in the province. AmR (TS) 915