The Hand That Feeds the Fire

Meshaal ended up in Syria, where he remains with a high public profile. Last week he met reporters at the Four Seasons Hotel in the capital. His ties to the Syrian government? "It's clear we have bad relations," he joked. "That's why I'm giving a press conference in Damascus." And his links to Hizbullah? "They are part of the resistance [to Israel], so of course we have contacts."

The Syrians: Posters on walls all over Damascus last week showed President Bashar al-Assad flanked by Nasrallah on one side and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the other. Syria is the go-between, the vital link between Iran and Hizbullah, as well as between Iran and Palestinian radicals. Assad's father, the dictator Hafez al-Assad, always took care to keep control of the troublesome proxies he used against Israel. In 1987, when members of Hizbullah grew so cocky that they started humiliating Syrian troops at checkpoints in Beirut, Assad had several of them lined up in their barracks and shot. But Bashar is much weaker, and much more dependent on Iran--virtually his only ally. Last month Damascus and Tehran signed a military agreement to establish "a joint front against Israel." The pact includes a commitment promising unrestricted passage through Syria for Iranian arms shipments to Hizbullah.

The Iraqis: Tehran scarcely needs Syrian help to infiltrate Iraq. Iran's influence is pervasive there already. The Baghdad press reported last week that the Iranians had allocated $1 billion to develop Iraq's telecommunications industry and integrate the two countries' systems. Iran sponsors book fairs, supports the pilgrimage of millions of Iranians to Shiite holy places in Iraq and provides transportation for Iraqi pilgrims going the other way to shrines in Iran.

Iran also exerts a much more sinister presence. Residents of Basra report that members of the Iranian intelligence service operate openly in their city's streets. Iranian agents are said to have infiltrated the militias, the political parties and the Iraqi security services. U.S. officials believe that Iran gave Iraqi insurgents know-how to build the shaped-charge IEDs that have been so effective in attacking Coalition forces--a technique perfected by Hizbullah guerrillas against the Israelis. Although Iran presents itself as the defender of Shiites in Iraq's worsening sectarian warfare, it has also had at least a passing relationship with Al Qaeda terrorists who have made every effort to instigate a blood feud between Sunnis and Shiites. The late, unlamented Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi initially made his way from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2001 through Iranian territory, and some intelligence reports suggest a more extensive relationship with Iran, at least in the early days of his terrorist career.

Iran's clerics have deep ideological differences with the nettlesome Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr. Even so, Tehran supports him and his Mahdi Army militia, which has repeatedly been linked to ferocious death-squad killings. "I used to fight for free," a former member of Sadr's forces told NEWSWEEK, "but today the Mahdi Army receives millions of dollars every month from Iran in exchange for carrying out the Iranian agenda." Part of the program: assassinations of prominent Sunnis and former Iraqi military officers who fought against Iran in the 1980-88 war. The United States would not like to confront, again, the kind of simultaneous Sunni and Shiite insurrections it faced in 2004, but tensions are fierce. "The government is unable to do anything to control the Mahdi Army," says Sheik Abu Muhammad al-Baghdadi, a well-connected figure in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. "This Army is a bomb set to go off in the near future."

The Iranians: When Tehran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, met last week with the European Union's Javier Solana and delegates from Britain, France, Germany and Russia, they expected he'd make some counteroffer to their proposed package of incentives for Iran to stop its nuclear-enrichment program. But no. "If he'd come with a partial response, we could have kept on," said one of the Europeans in the room, who asked not to be identified because of the confidentiality of the discussion. "But he came with no response. Instead, he kept saying that all this was entirely about 'regime change,' so why talk at all?"