When reports began circulating this week that the commission investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks would report that some of the hijackers passed through Iran before the attacks, Hamid Reza Asefi, the foreign ministry spokesman, compared Iran's lack of control of its remote 900km border with Afghanistan to the US's own problems with Mexico.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the influential former president, hit back at the US on Tuesday for its role in training Islamic militants in Afghanistan. "Everyone knows who made the Taliban and al-Qaeda," he said.
| "Why is everyone looking at us?" |
While some of the Arab press has alleged that Iranian Revolutionary Guards had a direct role in allowing al-Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran, John McLaughlin, the acting CIA chief, said there was "no evidence [of] official sanction by the government".
As a state based on Shia Islam with mainly Sunni countries to its north and east, Iran has never been comfortable with the fierce brand of Sunni Islam followed by al-Qaeda. Leaders of al-Qaeda have often attacked Shia Islam's veneration of long-dead imams - those believed by Shia to be the legitimate successors to the Prophet Mohammad - as a violation of monotheism.
Within Iran, a militant Sunni group based in Pakistan and possibly linked to the al-Qaeda network was suspected of the 1994 bombing of the shrine of the seventh Shia imam, Reza, in Mashad, killing 26 people. Iran supported the Northern Alliance against Afghanistan's Taliban government, which was allied to al-Qaeda, and in 1998 massed troops on the border after the Taliban executed 11 Iranian diplomats and journalists.
But Tehran has pursued what diplomats in Iran call "strategic ambiguity" with regard to al-Qaeda. Last year, Iranian officials announced they were holding members of the group and did nothing to dampen speculation that these included Saif al-Adel, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a former spokesman, and Saad, Ousama bin Laden's son. Iran signalled it wanted to use the detainees as part of wider negotiation with the US, possibly over members of an Iranian opposition group, the Mujahidin-e Khalq, detained by US forces in Iraq.
A conservative Iranian analyst in Tehran said it was not in Iran's interest to crack down entirely on al-Qaeda unless there was a wider rapprochement with Washington. "Al-Qaeda is like a dangerous snake," he said. "If you see it attacking someone who says he is your enemy, you will not attract the snake's attention so it attacks you. With this snake, there are no effective half measures - either you kill it or leave it free, as wounding it will make it angry and more dangerous." 
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