SULAIMANIYA, Iraq — While Iran’s connection to Sunni Islamist terrorism is hotly debated in Washington, it is not disputed in Iraqi Kurdistan, about 60 miles from the border with the Islamic Republic.

In an interview yesterday inside his headquarters, the director of the security ministry for the Sulaimaniya province, Sarkawt Hassan Jalal, said he has no doubt Iran is helping send Sunni jihadists into his territory. He listed the five border towns on the Iranian side where he says they are based: Mariwan, Pejwan, Bokan, Sina, and Serdai.

For General Jalal, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s original group, known as Tawhid and Jihad, was sent by the Iranians and Al Qaeda to attack the Kurds and Americans. At the end of a 90-minute interview, he summed up his view of Iran as follows: “Iran is at the top of the terrorism in all the world. There will be peace in the world when you change the authorities in Iran.” He is in a position to know; Kurdish Islamist groups, by his count, tried to assassinate him on three separate occasions.

Those direct public remarks are almost singularly rare for a senior Kurdish official. When American forces on January 10 seized five Iranians it claimed were members of Iran’s elite Quds Force in the Kurdistan provincial capital of Irbil, Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, publicly urged the Americans to return the men he claimed were acting as diplomats. Privately, Kurdish officials say the supposed diplomats were supporting terrorists, providing maps and training, but that the raid failed to net any senior Iranian operatives despite initial intelligence suggesting the no. 3 man in the Quds Force was there.

Other senior Kurdish officials here note the sensitive position of Sulaimaniya in particular, with its reliance on Iran for electricity, gasoline, and trade. In an interview, the governor of the Sulaimaniya province, Dana Ahmed Majid said of the Iranians, “We are brothers, not friends. Brothers you cannot choose, you cannot choose your neighbor.”

But for General Jalal, Iran is also a source of jihad. He said, “There are these jihadists in Iran. The Iranian authorities know about them. They have big capabilities and they are based close to our border. I ask, who can cross that border without the Iranians knowing? They can turn the dial up or down.”

The main threat for Iraq’s Kurds here is the next generation of Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist group initially affiliated with the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, who has since been slain. In 2002, Ansar al-Islam tried to assassinate the current deputy prime minister, Barham Salih. The organization has also attacked Kurdish police chiefs. In the first days of the war, the base of the organization was destroyed at their camp in Biara, near the Kurdish town of Halabja, the site of the Iraqi army’s infamous poison gas attack in 1988.

The American and Kurdish operation, known as Viking Hammer, wiped out the Ansar al-Islam base, but many of the senior leaders fled to Mariwan and the other towns on the Iranian side of the border. Since 2003, the Kurdish security services have been fighting a campaign to keep the new Islamists, who have regrouped under the banner of Ansar al-Sunna, out of Iraq and out of their territory. Today that group’s Web site calls itself Al Qaeda in Kurdistan.

Military intelligence in particular has linked members of Iran’s Quds Force in Iraq to supporting operations and individuals in the new Ansar al-Sunna, as The New York Sun first reported in January. On April 10, Major General William Caldwell announced that America had evidence of Iranian support and had found Iranian-produced arms in Sunni terrorist strongholds.

In the interview, General Jalal says his 300-man outfit has arrested more than 100 jihadists who have crossed into his province from Iran since 2003. They include a husband and wife team, who he identified by their first names, Tooba and Khasraw, that tried to establish a safe house to recruit, fund, and equip suicide bombers; as well as an adolescent Iranian boy who was traveling through northern Iraq in order to detonate himself in Baghdad.

General Jalal also said the Iranian border area is a transit point for foreign Arab terrorists from as far away as Libya. Other counterterrorism officials this week confirmed the assessment. One senior official who works for a branch of the Iraqi government, as opposed to the regional Kurdistan government, also said Iran has helped Ansar al-Sunna establish Iranian nongovernmental organizations.

General Jalal yesterday said his best weapon against the jihadists is the majority of Kurdish citizens. “We are getting tips all the time,” he said. When asked how he knows to distinguish between a potential terrorist and, say, an average worker, he says his network is superior to Iran’s and the Islamists.

He pointed out that border guards on the Kurdish side are trained to spot freshly shaven beards, for example. He said, “When they come here they get into cars at strange places on the roads. They come down from the mountains and show up on the highways.”