HUNDREDS of Iranian demonstrators laid siege to the British Embassy in Tehran yesterday, smashing windows, burning British flags and demanding an end to the military campaign in neighbouring Iraq.

The incident, which coincided with reports of Iraqi Armed Forces using Iranian territory to attack British troops in southern Iraq, raised fears that Tehran’s neutrality in the war may be eroding.

Richard Dalton, the British Ambassador to Tehran, said that several hundred protesters had marched on the embassy in the centre of the capital after Friday prayers.

“The crowd demonstrated for about 45 minutes. They threw stones and smashed windows in the chancery building, which is close to the road,” he said.

The crowds chanted “Death to Britain” and “British hypocrites should be expelled from Iran”. Iranian riot police prevented demonstrators from scaling the perimeter wall of the large embassy compound, but did little to stop the stone-throwing.

“No one was hurt. The cleaners are now sweeping up the debris. When the crowd disperses we will inspect the damage,” Mr Dalton told The Times. “On a Richter scale of Middle East riots, it was probably a two out of five.” Nevertheless, the demonstration will cause concern in London, where officials at the Foreign Office are keen to maintain good relations with Iran while the coalition’s military campaign is under way in Iraq.

The protest was encouraged by Ayatollah Muhammad Yazdi, the hardline former head of the judiciary, who used his sermon at Friday prayers to condemn the United States for returning to the “law of the jungle” and “the rule of the mighty over the weak”.

Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, said yesterday that America would not be content with Iraq. “They have evil plots to gain control over the region,” he said.

Although President Saddam Hussein is loathed by ordinary Iranians, tens of thousands of whom died during the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian regime is concerned that America will focus on Iran once it has claimed victory in Iraq.

Any encouragement that the Iranians give Saddam’s regime could seriously complicate the coalition’s campaign. This is particularly true in the British sector around Basra, where the majority Shia population maintains close ties with its Iranian brethren across the border.

Yesterday Royal Marines, who control al-Faw peninsula, said that Iraqi fighters had crossed over the Shatt al-Arab waterway into Iraq and were using the area as a base to attack British positions. “Fedayin and other paramilitaries may well try to use the border to fight a guerrilla war against us, or as an escape route after hit-and-run attacks on us,” Captain Steve Tamlyn, the intelligence officer for 40 Commando, said.

“We certainly know about their movements across it (the border) since we have been here, but we are not sure how welcome they will be in Iran.”

British officials insisted yesterday that, despite the strains caused by the war, Britain still had normal working relations with Iran.

The demonstrations in Tehran and other Iranian cities coincided with anti-war protests across the Arab world. In Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, nervous Arab states torn between pro-US regimes and pro-Iraqi populations, riot police wearing helmets turned out in force after a week of rising popular anger fuelled by 24-hour images of Iraqi suffering and defiance on Arab satellite television channels.

One week into the conflict, there is no doubt who has won the regional propaganda war. Through clever imagery and bludgeoning repetition, Saddam has used Iraqi television and sympathetic Middle East networks to portray himself as defender of the Muslim faith and Iraq as the sole Arab barricade to American neo-imperialism.

Anxious to curtail the effects of such propaganda before it inflames the Arab street, riot police in Jordan yesterday lashed out at thousands of angry pro-Iraqi sympathisers, who had emerged from of the historic al-Husseini mosque in Amman after noon prayers.

“God is greatest, America is the Devil,” the crowd chanted as up to 5,000 demonstrators surged through the old city’s shopping district, before being scattered by the police of a regime well-versed in enforcing public order.

In the southern city of Maan, an Islamist stronghold, preachers called on the regime to expel US troops stationed at remote airfields in the east of the country, while a crowd of 6,000 carried Iraqi flags and portraits of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

In Egypt, more than 15,000 protesters marched from the famed al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, denigrating President Mubarak as a “US agent”.

Such anger at Jordan and Egypt’s unpopular alliances with Washington is exactly what Saddam has exploited in recent days, say analysts of his propaganda strategy, which includes pro-Iraqi images beamed into neighbouring countries. Among the most popular is the elderly Iraqi farmer pictured by pro-Iraqi broadcasters standing before an Apache helicopter gunship he — implausibly — is said to have shot down with an old rifle.

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