ASTARA, AZERBAIJAN — If there is a post-Cold War Berlin, it may well be this agricultural town straddling a river between Iran and Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that has become an important ally in Washington's declared war on Islamic extremism.
The pedestrian border crossing is a narrow steel gateway and bridge, traversed daily by local people with a foot in both countries, the occasional heroin trafficker, traders bearing cheap clothing and perfumes and, sometimes, Shiite Muslim proselytizers with boxes full of Iranian religious CDs.
"We see books, all kinds of religious materials. In all of these cases, we take the materials and give them to the administration," said a border guard who stood scrutinizing a long line of Iranians filing into the country.
In the turbulent world of geopolitics, the Middle East gets most of the ink. But it is here along the gloomy shores of the Caspian Sea that one of the most vital global contests -- for energy, money and political dominion -- is being waged between East and West.
Azerbaijan, which controls 7 billion to 13 billion barrels of petroleum reserves, is home to a crucial new pipeline that provides the West with its first major access to Caspian Sea oil that is not dependent on Russia. The Central Asian country is also a key refueling point for U.S. planes bound for Afghanistan.
In the last year, however, this little-known nation dominated by Shiite Muslims has seen a rising incidence of religious fundamentalism and threats of extremist violence in opposition to the government's ties with Washington.
Some of it is spillover from Muslim separatist violence in the nearby Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. But the fingerprints of Shiite-ruled Iran are increasingly apparent, authorities say, in what many analysts believe is a warning against expanded cooperation with the United States.
"Today, Azerbaijan has made a European choice, but Iran has made a choice to the East," said Rasim Musabayov, a political analyst in the capital, Baku. "It seems to them that an independent Azerbaijan is somehow a danger for the existence of the Iranian republic."
Concerns in Tehran
The fact of "an increase in Iranian subversive activities in Azerbaijan" coincides with growing Iranian fears that Azerbaijan could be used as a launchpad for an American attack on Iran, said Svante E. Cornell, deputy director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "It's basically telling the Azeris, 'This is the damage we can inflict on you,' " he said.
