Summary: The surging unrest in numerous countries in the Middle East and northern Africa is a complex and fast-moving story. To help make sense of it, msnbc.com asked experts to share their insights on the protests, answer readers’ questions, and explain why what happens in that volatile region matters. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on March 31, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that Iraq’s political disarray had deepened, with potential kingmaker Muqtada al-Sadr withholding his support from the two biggest election winners — the blocs of Ayad Allawi and Nouri al-Maliki — and saying he would ask his supporters to make their choice in a referendum.

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Summary: Gunmen wearing military uniforms over explosives belts held a Tikrit, Iraq government center hostage in a grisly siege that ended with the deaths of at least 56 people, including three Salahuddin province councilmen who were executed with gunshots to the head and set fire. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on March 29, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that nine alleged members of a Midwest Christian militia group, the Hutaree, had been charged with plotting to kill a police officer and slaughter scores more by bombing the funeral, with the intent of inciting an uprising against the U.S. government.

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Summary: A roadside bomb killed six people and wounded 12 in the oil-rich city of Basra in southern Iraq after reportedly missing a passing U.S. Army patrol. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on March 6, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that former Mahdi Army militia members, emboldened by the prospect of an Iraq free of the U.S. military and by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s decision to join a Shiite-led alliance expected to become the single largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament after the 2010 election, were reemerging ahead of the national elections.

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Summary: Militants attacked and shut down Iraq’s largest oil refinery, at Beiji, killing four workers and setting off bombs that started a raging fire. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 27, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the Chilean coast was racing across the Pacific Ocean, potentially threatening Hawaii.

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Summary: Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets that “the odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq — invading, pacifying, and administering a large third-world country — may be low” and that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa” should, in the words of General Douglas MacArthur, “have his head examined.” … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 26, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that insurgents had struck in the heart of the Afghan capital with suicide attackers and a car bomb, targeting hotels used by foreigners and killing at least 16 people and wounding dozen. The four-hour assault began about 6:30 in the morning with a car bombing that leveled a residential hotel used by Indian doctors. A series of explosions and gunbattles left blood and debris in the rain-slicked streets and underscored the militants’ ability to strike in the heavily defended capital even as NATO marshals its forces against them in an assault on Marjah in the volatile south.

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Summary: The Iraqi capital of Baghdad is virtually locked down, with soldiers deployed across the city searching protesters trying to enter Liberation Square and closing off the plaza and side streets with razor wire. The heavy security presence reflects the concern of Iraqi officials that anti-government demonstrations in Iraq could gain traction as they did in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 24, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that more than eight years after the Taliban was toppled from power, the number of U.S. military fatalities in the Afghanistan war was nearing 1,000, a grim milestone in a resurgent conflict claiming the lives of an increasing number of troops who had survived previous tours of duty in Iraq.

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Summary: About 2,000 demonstrators attacked government offices in the southern Iraqi province of
Wasit, ripping up pavement stones to hurl at a regional council headquarters in a protest over shoddy public services, leaving dozens of people injured. In the northern city of Sulaimaniyah, hundreds of demonstrators also thronged the streets demanding better services. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 16, 2010, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

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Summary: Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi defector who fled Iraq in 1995 and went by the codename “Curveball,” has publicly admitted for the first time that he made up stories about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret factories to try to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 15, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that the incendiary rhetoric of demagogues like Glenn Beck or Michele Bachmann is powerful because it slips through the cracks in our acculturated human rationality, with its biological substrates in the fontal cortex, to hit a lower nerve in the subcortical brain regions of the limbic system, the seat of emotion.

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Summary: A suicide bomber blew himself up near a crowd of Shi’ite pilgrims at a bus depot in the Iraqi city of Samarra, killing 38 people and wounding more than 70. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Taliban suicide bombers killed 19 people, including 17 members of the Afghan security forces, in an assault on the provincial police headquarters in Kandahar that also wounded 49 people, including 23 civilians and nine children. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 12, 2010, Aubrey Immelman reported that more than two-thirds of the United States’ land mass had snow on the ground, with snow cover in 49 of the 50 states — Hawaii being the lone exception.

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Summary: A suicide bomber posing as a dairy deliveryman struck a Kurdish security headquarters, setting off a series of rapid-fire attacks in the oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk killing seven and wounding up to 80 people. … With daily shootings and deadly bombings, it’s clear there’s still a simmering fight in Iraq as the U.S. military prepares to leave after nearly eight years, almost 4,400 U.S. troops killed and at least $750 billion spent. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 9, 2010, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and reported on the death of retired United States Marine Corps colonel Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.).

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