Briefing | Thirty years after the first Gulf war

The Kurdish spring did not happen

But there have been gains as well as setbacks

|DIYARBAKIR, ERBIL AND RAQQA

IN THE 1980s, when Basak Demirtas was just five, the police came for her father. Four years ago, her children watched their father being arrested in their turn. “I didn’t think my daughters would have to experience the same thing,” she says. But the lot of the Kurds is slow to change.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “Down but not out”

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