Iran claims to be an emerging new world power. But its president, now visiting Zimbabwe, is welcome in few capitals

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's friends are not all quite as controversial as he is on the world stage but like his host in Harare, Robert Mugabe, few of them are routinely welcome in western capitals.

Elsewhere in Africa the Iranian president has hobnobbed with the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes allegedly committed in Darfur – a charge vehemently denied by Khartoum.

Last year Ahmadinejad is distrusted by the conservative, pro-western Arab states, who worry about him acquiring nuclear weapons. But in March 2008 he became the first Iranian president ever to visit Iraq, which fought a bloody eight-year war against the Islamic Republic in the 1980s. He has also held talks with another neighbour, the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul.

His closest ally in the Middle East is Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who inherited the strategic relationship between Damascus and Tehran from his father, Hafez, and refuses to bow to US pressure to end it. Last month Ahmadinejad held a summit with Assad and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's Hizbullah.

Europe is largely off limits to Ahmadinejad: he attended a UN food security summit in Rome in 2008 but was shunned by Silvio Berlusconi. The previous year he was a guest of President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who is often described as Europe's last dictator and another of the world's most isolated leaders.

Appearances at the UN in New York are the closest he gets to North America, where his anti-Americanism, Holocaust denial and hostility to Israel are deeply disliked.

But he has been most welcome in Latin America. Brazil was his first foreign destination – President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticised attempts to isolate Iran over its nuclear programme.

Ahmadinejad's best friend is Venezuela's Hugo Chávez who has backed Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Chavez and Ahamdinejad have visited each other several times and co-operation between their countries has grown. Both are are oil producers and members of Opec.

Ahmadinejad boasted earlier this month that Iran was emerging as a "new power in the world" which would welcome better relations with any country "except the Zionist regime whose legitimacy has not been recognised."