On March 16, 2006 Kurdish demonstrators in the city of Halabja set fire to a memorial commemorating the victims of a 1988 chemical bombing attack on the city that killed an estimated 5,000 men, women, and children. In the clash between demonstrators and Kurdish security forces, police killed one teenage protestor. The event drew international attention both because of the dark irony of Kurdish demonstrators destroying a memorial built to honor their own dead and because it highlighted little-noticed but growing tension between local Kurdish communities and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. This paper examines state-society relations in Halabja, and, more generally, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, through the prism of the Halabja protest and the events surrounding it. I suggest we can interpret these events as a effort by local people to gain control over the considerable symbolic and material resources Halabja accrued due to its status as a martyred Kurdish city, and, thus, to renegotiate the relationship between citizens and the KRG. The paper is divided into three sections. Part I examines Halabja's symbolic resources and the ways that KRG officials had monopolized this symbolic capital to serve the broader Kurdish nationalist cause. Part II of the paper examines the protest itself. Events immediately prior to and following the protest suggest this was a student-led and community-supported effort to convince KRG officials to make good on their promises and rebuild the city, or, put another way, to use the material benefits provided by the city's symbolic status to focus on those who still lived, rather than only on those who had died. Part III of the paper examines how local community members, non-governmental organizations, and the independent media mobilized after the protest to reconfigure the balance of power between officials and people of Halabja. The paper is based on three main sets of sources: 1) face-to-face interviews with protestors, media and NGO representatives, and government officials; 2) Sorani- and English-language media accounts, particularly in the independent press (e.g., Hawlati and Awene); and, 3) government documents and NGO reports. It derives from research conducted in Halabja and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in 2009 and 2010.