IRAQ: Following a spate of suicide bombings, suspicions are growing among Iraq's Kurds that hard-line elements of the Iranian regime may be backing insurgent efforts to destabilise the region they control.
A total of 85 people have died and hundreds have been injured in three separate attacks over the past two months.
By the bloody standards of central Iraq, that's not many.
But the Kurdish north has until recently been a haven of peace.
The last attack, which killed the security chief and four others in the north-eastern town of Halabja on June 20th, was the first of its kind in Sulaimaniyah province since the fall of Baghdad.
Hours before, another explosion killed 20 military recruits in the Kurdish capital of Erbil.
Responsibility for both attacks was claimed by a man calling himself Molla Abbas.
"Our campaign will escalate", he said in a phone call to the independent Kurdish weekly, Hawlati.
The name is familiar to Kurdish intelligence officials. Abbas was a senior member of Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaeda-linked Kurdish group that controlled the mountains around Halabja until March 2003, when it was scattered by a joint US-Kurdish operation.
He is now believed to be based in Kirkuk.
What worries Kurdish officials, though, is that many of his former colleagues are living unmolested on the other side of the Iranian border.
"Ansar is now based in Iran", says one senior Kurdish intelligence officer.
"This week's attacks could not have happened without Iranian support."
The belief that Iran is meddling in Iraq is as widespread among Iraqis as it is in the Pentagon.
In a March 2005 report on "Iran in Iraq", the Brussels-based policy institute, International Crisis Group (ICG), treated most allegations with scepticism.
Despite official Iranian denials, however, ICG concluded that Kurdish claims about Ansar "most likely have merit."
For Iraqi Kurdish journalist Jemal Penjweni, who last visited Iranian Kurdistan two months ago, the allegations are incontrovertible.
For at least the past eight months, he says, Ansar escapees from Iraq have been hosted in two former refugee camps near the Iranian town of Mariwan.
"Their numbers have increased thanks to proselytisation campaigns in the [ Iranian Kurdish] cities of Mahabad and Saqqiz," he said.
He added that with anti-Americanism widespread among Iranian Kurds, "new recruits see Ansar as a means of fighting both coalition forces and the 'quisling' Iraqis collaborating with them."
The authors of the ICG report suggest Shi'ite Iranian support of the Shi'ite-hating Ansar might be an act of retaliation: Iraqi Kurdish parties have long harboured two Kurdish Iranian opposition groups.
Others put the apparent contradiction down to Iranian fears that Iraq's new experiment in Kurdish federalism could incite its own disgruntled Kurdish minority.
It is no coincidence, they say, that the June 20th attacks came five days after Massud Barzani was sworn in as federal Iraqi Kurdistan's first president.
"None of our neighbours approves of what is happening here", said Ezzedin Berwari, a senior politician in Sulaimaniyah. "None wishes us success."
For Shwan Mohamed, political editor of Hawlati, the real turning point in Iran's use of Ansar came with the formation of Iraq's new government early in May.
"Before then, Tehran was keen to see the Kurds co-operate with the [ Iraqi] Shi'ite parties", he said.
"Now that the Shi'ites are on top, Iran is doing its best to weaken the Kurdish wing in parliament. Bomb attacks up here are an ideal distraction."