By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BAGHDAD - To keep up with the byzantine twists and turns in Iraq’s political crisis, you need a map. As efforts to form a new government intensified, seven months after the country’s inconclusive election, so did the travels abroad of Iraqi political leaders competing to make a political deal.

A leading Shiite cleric, Ammar al- Hakim, was in Damascus, Syria, in early October, while the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, flew to Istanbul. And Ayad Allawi, the champion of secular politics across the Shiite-Sunni divide who is losing ground in his campaign to be recognized as the rightful prime minister, went to Damascus and Cairo seeking Arab backing for his quest.

The Kurdish region’s president, Massoud Barzani, who emerged from the election a political kingmaker, was in Vienna, while Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric whose followers now wield more political influence than ever, worked the phones from his exile in Qom, Iran. Ahmed Chalabi, a survivor even though many Iraqis fault him for encouraging the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq, was back in the United States, speaking at the Washington Ideas Forum .

All of which raises an obvious question: Wouldn’t it just be easier to negotiate here in Baghdad? The flurry of travel “is mere posturing by Iraqi leaders, in many cases to compensate for their continued inability to talk directly to each other in Baghdad,” said Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs .

The frequent-flier nature of Iraqi politics is one reason the country’s impasse has dragged on as long as it has. It reflects the deep divisions and distrust inside Iraq, as well as the efforts of its neighbors to exploit them . All of Iraq’s big neighbors ? Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and especially Iran ? have tried to shape the new government that will lead Iraq past the withdrawal of the last American military forces in 2011. From the start of the election campaign, through the vote last March and the protracted impasse that has followed, they have lobbied and mediated, bankrolled favorites and opened their doors - even as the Iraqis complain of interference in the country’s internal affairs, often while on the soil of those doing the interfering.

“We, frankly, believe that there are foreign dictates on the political process,” said Mr. Allawi, who is the most peripatetic, having spent as much time of late traveling in the region, from Yemen to Istanbul, as he has in Iraq. “We believe that Iran clearly dictates on the political process.” That was right before travels during which he spoke to leaders in an effort to have them exert pressure on Iran not to exert pressure on Iraq. “Syria, Turkey, Moscow,” he said in an interview on Arabiya television. “I spoke with Prime Minister Putin.”

Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is, of course, is a key figure in all the maneuvering, even though he hasn’t been traveling of late. He heads a Shiite alliance that announced it would join with al-Sadr’s followers in a move that appeared to all but assure him of enough support to win a second term in office, but that also left enough unresolved to keep a government from actually forming .

And so it touched off the latest round of foreign travel, even as it intensified accusations of foreign meddling. The presumed foreign meddling would have been Iran’s. It was one theory to explain why Mr. Sadr, who has been there studying Islamic theology since Mr. Maliki’s government routed his militia in 2008, threw his clout in Parliament (40 of 325 seats) behind a man he vowed only weeks ago never to support.

He flipped, reportedly, after Iran pressed him to do so and just weeks after one of Mr. Maliki’s senior allies, the oil minister, Hussein al- Shahristani, secretly visited Tehran. At first glance, the Sadr-Maliki alliance seemed a coup for Iran, which has long been accused of trying to ensure Shiite dominance in Iraq’s government. Saudi Arabia and Turkey, by contrast, have all but openly expressed support for Mr. Allawi’s coalition, which captured most of the country’s Sunni votes.

But Mr. Visser said Iran’s shift also reflected the limits of external designs on Iraq’s internal affairs. “Only Iran has true leverage among the Iraqi factions, and even it cannot get exactly what it wants,” he wrote.

Iran had previously supported Mr. Maliki’s Shiite rivals, who include al-Hakim, and Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, when they were part of a broad Shiite alliance with Mr. Maliki. Now, however, Mr. Maliki’s deal with the Sadrists seems to have sundered that alliance, prompting Mr. Hakim and Mr. Mahdi to seek a deal with Mr. Allawi’s bloc. And within days, Mr. Hakim was on a plane to Damascus, where Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, seemed to be emerging as the new mediator.

Asked about foreign influence, Mr. Maliki himself was cryptic to the point of opacity. “If we say that State A adopts Maliki and a State B opposes him, then this means that the two states have different policies,” he told Iraq’s state television the day after he won the Sadrists’ support. But he added that “a state of understanding among states” was possible.

There are, perhaps, other factors at work in the traveling. Mr. Allawi, Mr. Chalabi and Mr. Maliki are among the many current Iraqi leaders who spent years in exile during Saddam Hussein’s rule, roaming foreign capitals in search of support to resist that regime.

It may be a habit. Anyway, who really could blame Iraq’s leaders for wanting to get out of Baghdad for a while? Swank hotels and official offices in capitals not battered by war are certainly a world apart from the turmoil here, the violence, the dust and the heat, the relentless security details and the bleak gray blast walls that surround any place anyone important would frequent.