IPS reporting from Sulaimaniya confirmed that two people died and scores were injured as angry protestors attacked the local headquarters of one of the two ruling Kurdish parties, while an opposition building was set ablaze in the other major Kurdish city.

The violence broke out in Sulaimaniya following a rally organised by a number of civil society groups to express solidarity with protestors in Egypt and Tunisia and protest the poor state of public services and corruption in the autonomous Kurdish region.

A curfew has since been imposed in Sulaimaniya since 7 pm Thursday, and there is an unusually heavy presence of police and security forces.

Hours after the attack on the Kurdistan Democratic Party's (KDP) building in Sulaimaniya, the local headquarters of Gorran (Change) opposition movement in Erbil, Kurdistan's capital city, was set on fire.

A Gorran leader told IPS his group holds the KDP responsible for the attack on its Erbil branch.

Mohammed Tofiq, Gorran's spokesman, said his party "has had nothing to do with the protests" in Sulaimaniya and the attack on KDP's building.

"We are fundamentally against what happened today… If we wanted to organise protests we would have publicly done it," Tofiq said. He criticised the guards at the KDP's building for shooting at demonstrators.

Thursday's incidents in northern Iraq broke out amid a wave of mass protests that has galvanised several Middle Eastern countries in the recent weeks, leading to the collapse of two governments in Egypt and Tunisia.