Tarek Al Hashemi, a contender for speaker when the new parliament opens on Sunday, said Iran was fostering instability in Iraq, partly through militias loyal to Shi’ite parties, in a bid to divert US pressure over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Iran denies such accusations. But his views, typical of Sunni politicians, signal tension ahead, both inside a future Iraqi national unity coalition and between Baghdad and Tehran.

“The main player in Iraq is Iran. It wants to create chaos for America in Iraq as part of the conflict over the nuclear issue,” Hashemi told Reuters in an interview in Jordan. “Pushing the Americans into a quagmire in Iraq at the present time serves Iran’s national interests.”

The 64-year-old businessman and former military officer who is general secretary of the moderate Iraqi Islamic Party and a leader of the Accordance Front parliamentary bloc said he was ”intensely worried” by sectarian bloodshed that followed the destruction of the Shi’ite Golden Mosque in Samarra on Feb. 22.

Longer term, he said, he believed Shi’ite Iran’s goal was to break up Iraq to satisfy territorial ambitions dating back through centuries of Arab-Persian and Sunni-Shi’ite conflict.

“If they control a civil war and steer it toward the south seceding, southern Iraq would then fall under Iranian hegemony,” he said. “This would be a great advantage for Iran.”

“Iranian intelligence is active across Iraq,” he said, repeating an accusation made by US and Iraqi leaders.

Proxy war

All Iraqis were paying the price for a proxy war between Iran and the United States on Iraqi soil, Hashemi said.

“The antagonists are Iran and America and those paying the price are the Iraqi people in the near term and, yes, in the long term, there are Iranian designs on Iraqi territory.”

Hashemi said Tehran’s influence especially across Iraq’s Shi’ite south had grown since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni-dominated rule after the US invasion of 2003.

Saddam fought a bloody war with Iran in the 1980s. His Shi’ite successors have established warm relations with Tehran.

Demands for greater regional autonomy under Iraq’s new federal constitution also worry Sunni leaders, traditionally the power in Iraq, whose community occupies northern and western areas less rich in resources than those of Shi’ites and Kurds.

Hashemi highlighted as a cause for concern bilateral deals on trade and security struck by governors in the south: “There were accords with central government but now there are bilateral ones between the southern provinces of Iraq and Iran,” he said.

The Samarra attack is portrayed by Iraqi and US officials as an attempt by Sunni Al Qaeda to foster a civil war that would weaken US authority; Al Qaeda allies accuse Iran and Iran blames the United States.

Hashemi, who is engaged in US-sponsored negotiations with Shi’ite, Kurdish and other leaders to form a national unity coalition government, described the killings of hundreds of people after the bombing as a “very grave indicator”.

He accused some Shi’ite militia of owing loyalties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and of running sectarian death squads:

“The possibilities are now much greater of a deterioration of the situation and there could be further repercussions,” he said. “I feel intensely worried.”