Kabul, Afghanistan ? In the first such visit in 40 years, Iran’s president came Tuesday to Afghanistan with a promise of $500 million in aid and a strong appeal to the new Kabul government to crack down on the Afghan opium that has hooked millions of Iranian addicts.

President Mohammad Khatami also had strong words for American critics who contend Iran has done little in the war on terrorism.

“We are victims of terrorism,” he told reporters. “We have longer experience than the Americans in fighting terrorism.”

Some U.S. officials accuse Iran of having allowed al-Qaida fugitives to cross through its territory since the ouster of the Taliban and their al-Qaida terrorist allies in Afghanistan.

But officials in Saudi Arabia said last weekend the Iranians had turned over 16 al-Qaida suspects to them. Khatami confirmed such deportations to Saudi Arabia and other countries, a move that may benefit the U.S. anti-terror effort.

“Even if we had just a little suspicion, we delivered them to their countries, and not just Saudi Arabia,” Khatami told reporters.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld rejected the Iranian position Tuesday.

“They have permitted al-Qaida to enter their country. They are permitting al-Qaida to be present in their country today,” Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference. “And it may very well be that they, for whatever reason, have turned over some people to other countries, but they’ve not turned any to us.”

The Iranian leader criticized the U.S. approach to the “war on terror,” however, saying Washington was acting unilaterally when the global endeavor should be conducted under the United Nations. “Fighting terrorism should not mean imposing the will of one country unilaterally on other countries of the world,” he said.

The Iranian president, whose nation was branded part of an “axis of evil” by President Bush, ironically found himself shielded by U.S. bodyguards on his Kabul visit.

American special forces soldiers in civilian clothes, the main security element for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Iranian security men as they shadowed the smiling, black-turbaned Khatami and Karzai during the Iranian’s nine-hour visit to Kabul.

Iran has deep historical, cultural and linguistic ties to its poorer eastern neighbor Afghanistan, and its government was a key supporter of the northern alliance resistance to the 1996-2001 Taliban regime here, which Khatami referred to derisively as the “government of ignorance.”

Khatami, on the first visit by an Iranian head of state to Afghanistan in four decades, reported to the Afghans that the Iranian parliament last week approved a $50-million first-year installment on a promised $500 million in Iranian aid for Afghan reconstruction. Twenty-three years of war have left Afghan roads, communications, agriculture and industry in ruins.

Among other things, the Iranians are rebuilding the 75-mile highway from the western Afghan city of Herat to the Iranian border; granting 2,000 Iranian university scholarships to Afghan students; planning electricity supplies for Herat province; and donating 50 city buses to Kabul.