Who Is Iraq's 'Person of the Year' For 2015?

It's not an easy thing to do in a place where you don't know if the soldiers guarding the demonstration will turn their weapons on you. The demonstrations resulted in some of the most significant promises for real reform in years, backed – perhaps most importantly - by senior religious figures in Iraq. Although those promises will likely take a lot longer to be fulfilled – and that is, if they are ever completely fulfilled - the demonstrators who started that process in good faith deserve to be celebrated for their bravery and their hope, in a country where the latter is a particularly scarce commodity right now.

Vian Dakhil

Dakhil is the woman who cried out to the world about the crimes that the IS group was committing against her people, the Yazidis. She is also the Yazidi minority's representative in the Iraqi Parliament in Baghdad. When thousands of Yazidis from the Sinjar area were trapped in the mountains after being attacked by the IS group, Dakhil rode in a helicopter up to the mountains. The helicopter crashed and she narrowly escaped death with a broken leg and broken ribs. But that did not stop her in her humanitarian mission.

Nor did it slow her international media campaign around the plight of the kidnapped Yazidi women; she has been successful in securing the release of some of these women from the IS group and she continues to contribute to their rehabilitation after their ordeal. As a result she has been recognised internationally, having been awarded a number of human rights prizes including the Bruno Kreisky Prize in 2015.

Dakhil made the whole world feel for her people and she was able to draw the attention of the world's media and world leaders to the Yazidi plight. She is respected throughout the Arab world for her efforts.

Hero Ibrahim Ahmad

Ahmad is married to Jalal Talabani, the head of one of Iraqi Kurdistan's largest and most influential political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK. Between 2005 and 2014, while her husband was Iraq's President, she was the First Lady of Iraq. After Talabani was felled by a stroke in 2012 and officially left that job in 2014, his wife became just another member of her party's caucus. However behind the scenes Ahmad has a lot more power than this and is widely seen as maintaining her family's control over the PUK.