In a makeshift campaign war room in north Tehran, several 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 centre in the campaign to unseat hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not run by any of the three candidates who are challenging him in the election on Friday. Instead, it is part of a bitter behind-the-scenes rivalry that has helped define the campaign, pitting 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, Rafsanjani, who is backing the campaign against the President and whose son runs the war room, released an open letter in which he complained about what he called the President’s “insults, lies and false allegations” and asked Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to intervene. During a campaign debate with the strongest challenger a week ago, Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani of stealing billions of dollars of state money and called him “the main puppet master” behind the campaign against him.

The President clearly hopes to associate his challengers with Rafsanjani, who is one of the Islamic republic’s founding figures but is widely viewed as corrupt.

Rafsanjani is striking back, accusing Ahmadinejad of undermining the state itself. His letter casts Ahmadinejad’s election broadsides — aimed at several figures who were close to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the 1979 revolution — as an attack on the country’s senior political class and therefore on the legitimacy of the entire system.

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