Iraqi women are studying the Kurdish-controlled north to see how women there have improved their status in the male-dominated Muslim society.
Iraqi Kurdistan has enjoyed virtual independence from the rest of Iraq since 1991, when the U.S., French and British governments set up a no-fly zone over the region.
Although the mountainous enclave has a long patriarchal tradition, during the past decade women here have pushed through legislation granting them unprecedented rights and protecting them from the honor killings that are commonplace elsewhere in the Middle East.
A newly formed Iraqi women's group has sent an eight-member delegation to meet with Kurdish women.
"Now that Iraq is free, we are demanding freedom and equal rights that Iraqi women have always been deprived of," Eman Ahmed, head of team for the Rising Iraqi Women's Organization, said Tuesday.
"To begin our struggle, we first decided to learn from the freedoms Kurdish women have enjoyed since 1991 and the changes they have introduced," she said.
In contrast, stringent curbs were imposed on women's rights in the past decade in the rest of Iraq as dictator Saddam Hussein sought to curry political support from conservative Muslim clerics.
Nowadays, many Iraqis visiting Sulaymaniyah and other Kurdish areas are shocked to see women in senior government positions, not covered by head-to-toe garments or simply walking in the streets unaccompanied by a male relative.
Ahmed said once a new interim government is formed in Baghdad, women's groups will start lobbying it to copy the laws already in force in the Kurdish north.
Last month in Madrid, Spain, a gathering of Iraqi opposition groups issued a statement calling for a newly formed government to respect women's rights.
Sayvan Rostam of the Women's Union of Kurdistan, who hosted the delegation from Baghdad, said before the new laws, honor killings routinely went unpunished in Kurdistan as they do elsewhere in Iraq.
"We have succeeded in getting at least two laws approved in the Kurdish parliament that treat a man killing a women relative on the pretext of honor as murder, and make it illegal for (Muslim) men to simultaneously take more than one wife," she said.
"Before 1991 ... we had no rights," she added. "We didn't even the right to demand justice for women, let alone taking steps to change male-dominated laws."
Shokhan Mahmoud, another Women's Union member, cautioned that much still remained to be done to change attitudes in the traditional, male-oriented society.
"Patterns of life are changing in Kurdistan," she said. "Men's monopoly has begun to melt and women have begun to seek equal rights."