THE results of Iraqi Kurdistan’s general election, announced on October 2nd, were scarcely earth-shaking. The dominant party won a few more seats, with merely a faint whiff of impropriety. The long-declining share of its historical rival fell a bit more, and an upstart party confirmed its growing appeal.

Yet for this largely autonomous region of Iraq the lack of drama itself counts as a victory. Bounded by more powerful states, as well as by violent turmoil and ceaseless intrigue, Iraq’s 5m Kurds have carved out a zone of relative peace and prosperity. A terrorist attack in their capital, Erbil, on September 29th only underscored the anomaly. It was the first such incident in six years. The assailants killed six policemen, but failed to reach their target, the headquarters of the Kurds’ main security agency. By contrast, on the same day alone Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, was hit by at least a dozen bombs that left 55-plus people dead.

Iraq’s Kurds face some tricky challenges, starting with the task of forming a new coalition. Since winning self-rule in 1991, their region has been run by a duopoly. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) represented not only differing ideologies but rival regions, clans and dialects. The KDP, loyal to the feudal Barzani family, controlled the western half, along the Turkish border. The socialist-leaning PUK, led by Jalal Talabani, dominated the east, adjacent to Iran. The two fought a vicious war in the 1990s, but for the past decade have shared spoils amicably. Mr Talabani took a job as Iraq’s overall president, leaving the presidency of the Kurdish region to the KDP chief, Masoud Barzani.

This cosy arrangement will have to change. In the previous election, in 2009, the parties ran on a joint list, easily securing control of the 111-member Kurdish parliament. This time they ran separately. Mr Barzani’s well-oiled machine boosted its party’s share to 38 seats, but the PUK’s tally slumped to just 18. It did not help that the charismatic Mr Talabani, felled by a stroke last December at the age of 79, remains incommunicado in a German hospital.

But the main reason for the PUK’s falling fortunes is the rise of the Change party (Gorran in Kurdish), which captured 24 seats. Manned largely by PUK defectors and founded only in 2009, it has benefited from widespread anger at the older parties’ alleged corruption, nepotism and repressiveness. With the remaining seats in the hands of Islamists, smaller parties and minority groups that have a quota of 11 MPs, Mr Barzani must now lure not only the PUK, but other partners, including possibly Gorran, to form a majority.

This may be the least of his worries. As the Erbil attack showed, surrounding dangers are beginning to press closer to home. The likely perpetrator was the regional al-Qaeda affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (meaning Greater Syria), whose activity has grown explosively in recent months. On October 2nd it reportedly shot down two Iraqi army helicopters, a nasty escalation in a campaign of bombings and assassinations, mostly aimed at Shias, that is on the verge of tipping Iraq into another round of all-out sectarian warfare.

In Syria, the Islamic Front is fighting not only against Bashar Assad’s regime, but against Kurdish groups seeking to define their own autonomous region in Syria’s north-east. Mr Barzani, wary both of next-door Turkey and of the fractious array of Kurdish parties in Syria, where Kurds make up a tenth of that country’s people, has tried to stay above the neighbourly fray, granting generous asylum to 200,000-plus mostly Kurdish refugees from Syria.

But the Iraqi Kurds’ punchy army, the Peshmerga, could be sucked into defending their Kurdish brethren in Syria. This is what Mr Assad hopes. Last month he dispatched a loyalist Syrian Kurdish MP as an envoy to Erbil, to tell Mr Barzani that the Syrian regime would welcome any help in fighting its Islamist rebels.