Iraq violence kills 23 as Gates visits
Middle East Desk Report

BAGHDAD—At least 23 Iraqis have been killed across the country, including 11 who died when a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives near Baghdad University. The carnage formed a grim backdrop Wednesday to the first visit to Iraq by the new US defence secretary, Robert Gates.
Twenty people were killed in Baghdad, including four who perished in another car bombing outside a passport office in the northern Kasr neighbourhood, according to a security official. Medics at the capital’s Yarmuk and Ibn Nafis hospitals said 11 people were killed and 30 wounded in the campus attack, while a security official said three police officers were among the dead.
“People were hopping over and treading on bodies as they scattered to get away,” said a young man who fled the scene. The explosion took place on a major road leading through the Karrada area, a once prosperous and broadly mixed part of Baghdad that is now increasingly dominated by Shiites. The target of the blast was not immediately clear. Medics said the dead were mainly students, but the US military said the bomber had attacked buses carrying pilgrims to Mecca. Baghdad’s universities have come increasingly under attack from Sunni extremist groups. Last week an Internet statement purportedly from the Ansar as-Sunna militant organisation explicitly threatened students.
The deputy dean of the Al-Mushtanriya University law faculty and three other Iraqis were killed by gunmen in the Sunni district of Adhamiyah, police said. Gunmen killed another person and wounded seven more at a bus station popular with students elsewhere in north Baghdad, security sources said.“People were hopping over and treading on bodies as they scattered to get away,” said a young man who fled the scene. The explosion took place on a major road leading through the Karrada area, a once prosperous and broadly mixed part of Baghdad that is now increasingly dominated by Shiites.
A teacher, whose famous actor brother was discovered dead Tuesday, was also shot dead in a Shiite neighbourhood in eastern Baghdad. Outside the capital, an Iraqi soldier was killed and three others wounded when a suicide bomber blew up a car near a checkpoint in the ethnically mixed northern oil hub of Kirkuk.
In the Shiite dominated south, a policeman was killed by gunmen in the southern Shiite city of Amara, security sources said.
Two leaders of Ansar as-Sunna, a Sunni inusrgent group that has claimed several attacks against Iraqi and US forces, were arrested in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, to the west, said police Brigadier General Abu Walid. Wednesday’s attacks came as Baghdad remained trapped in a vicious cycle of sectarian killings led by warring Sunni insurgent groups and Shiite militias.