The influential daily, quoting Thursday unidentified Western intelligence sources, says the decision had been taken at a recent session of the nations’ Supreme Council for National Security (SCNS) and initiated by Hojjatoleslam Hasan Rohani, the Councils’ powerful Secretary.

The SCNS is headed by the embattled President Mohammad Khatami but chaired by the fundamentalist leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i.

"The decision, backed by both the conservatives and the reformists, is also a gesture of solidarity with the U.S.-led campaign against international terrorism and Mr. Osama Ben Laden's Al-Qaeda network", the newspaper added.

Reminding that Iran’s revolutionary guards have trained the Lebanese Hezbollah for the past 20 years, the FAZ says now for the first time the Guard’s commander in southern Lebanon is getting ready to go back home with all his troops.

The Revolutionary Guards, who are separate from Iran's regular armed forces, started as a revolutionary militia after the 1979 Islamic revolution and grew into a ideological military force of more than 120,000 men in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Rev Guard commander Yahya Rahim-Safavi has informed all his units that the decision to call back Iranian military and intelligence units abroad had been taken by Ayatollah Khameneh’I in his quality as the supreme commander of all Iranian armed forces, the paper further said.

Analysts say the Islamic Republic has been seeking to shake off its "bad boy'' image and might even be looking to distance itself from some of the more militant links abroad.

Some diplomats say Iran has already won some credit in the West for its relatively muted response to the U.S. action in Afghanistan to flush out bin Laden, blamed for the September attacks in the United States.

The German paper also said Iran had warned the United States one day before former Mojahideen commander Abdol Haq entered Afghanistan in October that he was likely to be assassinated by the Taleban, information taken in Washington as another sign of goodwill.