Following the spontaneous popular uprising in Tunisia that led to the overthrow of the country's long-serving president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, unrest quickly spread across the Middle East and North Africa as citizens agitated for greater freedom. The spark for the uprising in Tunisia was the self-immolation of a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in the town of Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia, on December 17th. Aspiring martyrs across the region, inspired by Mr Bouazizi, emulated the act in the following weeks and months, drawing attention to their own lack of democratic expression and poor standard of living. A Mauritanian named Yacoub Ould Dahoud, a 40-year-old who was reportedly from a well-off family, set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, on January 17th. A suicide letter published on a social networking site, Facebook, which has been used across the region for communicating and organising the popular movements, indicated that he sought to motivate his countrymen to demand peaceful constitutional reform. Mr Dahoud's suicide and the sight of mass protest movements elsewhere in the Arab world inspired a period of popular protest in Mauritania that has yet to either fully abate or gather sufficient momentum to seriously threaten the regime.