A bloody crackdown on anti-government protests in Iraq has killed more than 275 demonstrators in recent weeks, and the death toll keeps rising. In the face of the government’s ruthlessness, the determination of the protesters represents a turning point in Iraq’s post-2003 political order.

The revolutionaries who helped end Omar al-Bashir’s repressive regime in Sudan are discovering that exercising power is often more difficult than attaining it. They are trying to undo three decades of misrule as part of an uneasy transitional government with generals who tried to seize power themselves.