In Iran Race, Ex-Leader Works to Oust President

By ROBERT F. WORTH
NYT

TEHRAN — In a makeshift campaign war room in north Tehran, two dozen young women clad in head scarves and black chadors are logging election data into desktop computers 24 hours a day, while men rush around them carrying voter surveys and district maps.

This nerve center in the campaign to unseat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s hard-line president, is not run by any of the three candidates who are challenging him in a hotly contested election on Friday.

Instead, it is part of a bitter behind-the-scenes rivalry that has helped define the campaign, pitting Mr. Ahmadinejad against the man he beat in the last election, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a two-term former president and one of Iran’s richest and most powerful men.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rafsanjani, who is backing the campaign against the president and whose son runs the war room, released an extraordinary open letter in which he complained about what he called the president’s “insults, lies and false allegations” and asked the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to intervene.

(More here.)