Sulaymaniyah, Iraq ? A visit to Iraqi Kurdistan provides a sobering glimpse of what the United States may be getting into if it winds up running Iraq.

This is the “good” part of Iraq in the mountainous north, inhabited mainly by ethnic Kurds who despise Saddam for his slaughter of their people. The Kurds, who live in an autonomous zone protected from Saddam’s troops by U.S. warplanes, have been able to establish their own democratic institutions. They want America to get rid of their oppressor, but they worry about what will happen after he is gone.

Indeed, talks with Kurds reveal the daunting complexity of the country whose burdens America may soon inherit.

On the bright side, Kurdistan shows it is possible for Iraqis to build a more open society — under U.S. protection. Kurds live under U.N. sanctions, but their leaders, unlike Saddam, spend the oil-for-food funds from the United Nations on food, medicine and school buildings. Over the last decade, the Kurds have established two regional parliaments and started new universities.

In Sulaymaniyah, one symbol of change is the huge amusement park created on the site of the former Iraqi military headquarters.

“I was in prison there in 1979,” says Barham Salih, the British-educated prime minister of the eastern region of Kurdistan, “and my dad was in prison there in 1963. Now it is an amusement park where lovers can wander around. That tells you we can revive this country.”

Sulaymaniyah boasts an Internet cafe and a cell phone shop on nearly every corner. But the legacy of Iraq’s violent past raises questions about the future of democracy here.

This Kurdish statelet, about twice New Jersey’s size with 4 million people, is divided into two parts, with two strong leaders who fought a bitter civil war in the 1990s. Only now are they trying to unify their separate parliaments. Cell phones still can’t call from one side to the other, and tribal politics and militias still exert a strong hold.

Then there are the Islamists. On my first day here, I attended the funeral of a top Kurdish military leader who was assassinated by members of a terrorist group known as Ansar-al-Islam. This group has links to al-Qaida and controls a handful of villages in the snow-capped mountains separating Iraqi Kurdistan from Iran. Later, Salih showed me where five of his bodyguards were cut down in a failed terrorist attempt to kill him as he was stepping out his door.

If the problem were only Ansar al-Islam, it could be eliminated by U.S. troops. But conservative Islam has been spreading. Drive through the Kurdish countryside and you see heavily draped women, and a new mosque in almost every village, built in the style of the Arabian Gulf, not of Kurdistan.

“Islamic groups have financial support from gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia,” says Aso Hardi, the editor of the independent newspaper Hawlati. “Given the economic situation in Kurdistan, money can do many things.”

The growth of Islamism stems from economic devastation (Saddam destroyed 4,500 Kurdish villages), Iranian meddling and public dissatisfaction with the performance of the two main political parties. It will take more jobs and better political behavior to wean rural Kurds away from the Islamist lure.

“Our problems don’t go away with Saddam,” says well-known Kurdish physician Fouad Baban. “Our problems start when Saddam leaves.” And Kurds’ problems will become America’s problems if U.S. troops are occupying Iraq.

Once Saddam is gone, Kurdish leaders will have to decide how to relate to a new government in Baghdad. They have agreed to put aside age-old dreams of independence and take part in a new Iraqi federation. The United States will have the tricky task of helping to shape a federal structure that satisfies other Iraqis as well as the Kurds.

The U.S. viceroy in Baghdad will also have to keep Kurdistan’s neighbors from harming its democratic aspirations. The Bush administration has pressed the Kurds to let tens of thousands of Turkish troops enter western Kurdistan. This is the price Washington has to pay Ankara for its agreement to let U.S. troops base in Turkey for an Iraq war.

But Turks and Kurds despise each other, and a Turkish troop presence could prove explosive, during and after the fighting. U.S. troops will be right in the middle of any Kurdish-Turkish standoff. American officials will also have to help Kurds prevent Islamist meddling by neighbor Iran.

If you think all this sounds complicated, it is a cinch compared to the complexities America will face in dealing with the rest of the country. The Kurds at least have some experience with democratic governance. The rest of Iraq is starting from zero.

Your troops and tax dollars will soon be trying to get them from zero to 10.

— Trudy Rubin is a columnist with The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubinphillynews.com.