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The professor at the front of the classroom was fighting a futile battle to keep his students' attention, lecturing them about things like uniform resource locators and “netiquette.”

With just 15 minutes to go until the lunch break, it was an uphill task. Half his audience had already mentally left the building, checking their Gmail and Facebook pages on their slick new Compaq laptop computers. One student watched this summer's Iron Man movie with the sound muted.

Prof. Roger Geyer's plight would be familiar to teachers the world over, though the stakes are arguably higher here in this corner of northeastern Iraq than in other computer science classrooms. Prof. Geyer's computer lab is part of the fledgling American University in Iraq in Sulaymaniyah, an experiment in progress, trying to bring Western-style education to this war-torn Middle Eastern country.

The AUI-S, as it is known, is a rapidly growing all-English university that's shattering the boundaries of what a university in Iraq can be. It's also a reminder of a time – before Sept. 11, 2001 – when the United States used “soft power” rather than military force to spread its influence around the planet.

The university, which opened early this year, has 200 students studying at a one-building temporary campus and hopes to expand to 500 students by next fall. Work on a sprawling new campus began on the southern edge of Sulaymaniyah earlier this year; it could eventually include a sports stadium, a museum and dormitory space for many of the 5,000 students the university expects to eventually enroll.

Acting chancellor Joshua Mitchell isn't modest about what he hopes to achieve with the American University. He wants nothing less than to break up the state monopoly on education that lingers from the Saddam Hussein era and to create a new generation of Iraqi leaders in the process.

Already, the AUI-S has rattled the Ministry of Education – used to presiding over even the smallest decisions – by hiring instructors who weren't approved in Baghdad and then allowing those professors to design their own syllabuses. As a result, the ministry is so far withholding certification of the AUI-S as an official Iraqi university.

“We're trying to break the mould here and give them a completely different education they'd get at other universities [in Iraq],” Dr. Mitchell said in an interview. “There was a lost generation under Saddam. People who should have gone overseas and gotten PhDs did not. They're 30 to 50 years behind in social sciences, 30 years behind in the sciences.”

How fast that ground will be made up – and who will get a chance to do it – is unclear. Most new students are expected to spend their first semester simply getting their English up to university level before moving on to study other disciplines. The $10,000 annual tuition, an astronomical amount for the vast majority of Iraqis, has also raised eyebrows, though Dr. Mitchell said nearly all of that money is reinvested in scholarships for students who have the grades, if not the greenbacks, to enter the university.

The “American” brand has proved another sensitive issue. Despite its name, the AUI-S actually isn't affiliated with either the American University in Beirut or the American University in Cairo.

The U.S. government has contributed only $10.3-million of the university's $500-million budget – worried, Dr. Mitchell said, that the AUI-S would look like an “imperial venture” because of being built while Iraq is under U.S. military occupation.

“We're concerned about the politics of America putting down its tentacles here in Iraq,” Dr. Mitchell said.

But the driving force behind the project was Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Salih, who received his doctorate in statistics and computer modelling from Liverpool University and who has a daughter enrolled at Princeton. As the university's founder, he wanted the word “American” in its name.

Like many ethnic Kurds, Mr. Salih has an affection for the United States, the country that liberated and protected the country's Kurdish north from Mr. Hussein's regime. The affection is not shared by most other Iraqis. The university's location here in this hotbed of Kurdish separatism was chosen for security reasons (even here it's surrounded by 21/2-metre high blast walls to prevent car bomb attacks, with Kurdish peshmerga fighters stationed at each entrance) but has nonetheless led to concerns it will viewed as the American University of Kurdistan.

To counter that, the university is working hard to lure Arab students from other parts of Iraq. Plans are already being made for additional campuses in Baghdad and Basra when the security situation in those cities stabilizes. Whether the American University will be as welcome there as in Sulaymaniyah is an open question.

“For Kurds, America is a good thing. … We got our rights because of them,” Saad Hassan, a 28-year-old business administration student, said over lunch in the university's tiny cafeteria. He paused and looked across a room to where the university's few Arab students sat at separate tables from the Kurdish majority. “But maybe some of the Arabs think differently from us.”