In Baqouba, five gunmen broke into the athletic department of a local university, seized the son of the department's director, took him into his father's office and shot both of them dead, police said. The city, located about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, has been riveted by sectarian violence for months.

US officials have accused Iran of fomenting sectarian strife by arming and training Shiite militias. President Bush has authorized US forces to kill or capture any Iranian agents found in this country. Defense officials are also looking into the possibility that Iranian agents may have been behind the Jan. 20 attack in Karbala in which five Americans were killed - four of them after being taken prisoner.

In an interview with NPR, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said there was a "political and moral difference" between what the United States and the Iranians are doing in Iraq, reiterating allegations that Tehran has been supporting Shiite militias that have been blamed for much of the recent sectarian violence in Iraq.

However, the US-backed Iraqi government includes Shiite and Kurdish parties with longtime ties to Iran, and the rising US-Iranian tensions adds new strains to an Iraqi leadership barely able to cope with the worsening security crisis.

During a news conference Thursday, the chief government spokesman said Iraq would consider any attack against US forces in Iraq as an assault against this country. But he added that Iraq also wants good relations with Iran.

"We have long borders with (the Iranians), we have local interests with (them) and we would like to have our relation not in the shadow of the others," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, said on CNN that Baghdad had told both the Iranians and the Americans "to solve your problems outside of Iraq."

As a sign of the war's toll, a Health Ministry official said 1,990 civilians had been killed in violence in January, a more than threefold increase from the 548 civilians the ministry reported killed in the same month last year. Casualty figures are controversial and widely disputed in Iraq, and counts kept by other groups, including the United Nations, have listed far higher numbers.

The official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to release the data, said 1,936 civilians also had been wounded, according to the figures, which were compiled from daily reports sent by morgues and hospitals nationwide.

Figures provided by the Defense and Interior ministries also showed that 100 Iraqi security forces were killed in January, while 593 insurgents were killed and 1,926 detained.

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