Buried in Thursday's annual State Department report on terrorism trends, which we blogged about yesterday, is an interesting little nugget about Iran's relationship with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Sh'ite Muslim group on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.

In a section of the report here, the State Department says that Iran provided $200 million in funding for Hezbollah in 2008, and trained 3,000 of its fighters in camps in Iran. We did a little calling around, and officials say this appears to be the most specific the U.S. government has been publicly about the size of the assistance that Iran provides Hezbollah, which is basically its proxy in Lebanon.

N&S spent some time searching, and could not find similar language and statistics in the 2007 version of the same report. 

Hezbollah, which fought a bloody 2006 war with Israel, is of course more than an armed faction or a terrorist outfit. It also has an extensive social welfare organization, and is a political party that controls Cabinet posts in Beirut. And it's expected to do well in Lebanon's elections next month.

Iran has also helped Hezbollah rearm, in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution adopted at the end of the 2006 war, the report charges.