Iraqi Officials Targets Of Attacks

In the northern city of Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, mortar attacks by insurgents killed two Iraqis and injured eight others, including seven school children, police and hospital officials said.

A car bomb also detonated in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, injuring 14 people — including 12 police officers. The car, parked in central Baqouba, blew up as a three-car police convoy drove by, damaging all the vehicles, police Col. Mudhafar Muhammed said.

Also in Baghdad, a roadside bomb targeting an American military convoy driving through the eastern part of the city injured seven Iraqis, police Lt. Col. Ahmed Aboud Efait said. There were no reports of any Americans injured, he added.

Gunmen also shot dead a transport ministry driver, Ali Mutib Sakr, in Sadr City, a predominantly Shiite area in the eastern part of the capital, police Lt. Col Shakir Wadi said.

The violence came one day after Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said the "situation would have been much worse" in Iraq if Tehran were actually supporting the insurgency as the United States has claimed.

Iranian envoy Kamal Kharrazi's trip on Tuesday — two days after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a surprise visit to support the war-ravaged country's political process — was the highest-level visit by an official from any of Iraq's six neighboring countries since Saddam Hussein's ouster two years ago.

Kharrazi, who held talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, President Jalal Talabani and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on a day of deepening sectarian violence, vowed that his country was committed to supporting Iraq's political and economic reconstruction and would do all it could to improve security conditions.

"We believe securing the borders between the two countries means security to the Islamic Republic of Iran," Kharrazi said.

Zebari said militants have infiltrated from Iran into Iraq "but we are not saying that they are approved by the Iranian government."

Al-Jaafari will leave Iraq for his first foreign visit since taking office last month, traveling for a May 20-21 trip to neighboring Turkey.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the aim of the visit "is to contribute to regional peace and environment of calm." Al-Jaafari would be accompanied by the ministers of trade, Oil, Electricity, Industry, Water resources and other high-level officials.

New British Defense Secretary John Reid also visited Iraq on Tuesday, traveling to Baghdad and Basra on his own first foreign trip. The stream of visitors is aimed at shoring up the new Iraqi leadership caught in a surge of violence that has killed more than 470 people killed since the government was announced April 28.

Ties between neighboring Iraq and Iran improved after the ouster of Saddam, who led an eight-year war against Iran during the 1980s in which more than 1 million people died. Relations remained cool after that war, with Iran supporting anti-Saddam groups and the former Iraqi leader hosting the Mujahedeen Khalq, an Iranian militia that fought the Shiite religious regime in Tehran.

But since the U.S.-led invasion swept Saddam from power, Iraq's majority Shiite Muslim community has risen to power and worked to build close ties with Iran.

Iran, however, has been accused of supporting insurgents in Iraq to destabilize reconstruction efforts by the United States, which regards Tehran as a terror sponsor bent on producing nuclear weapons. Iran denies both claims.

Al-Jaafari, who led anti-Saddam militiamen based in Iran during part of his two-decade exile, has said Iraq now wants positive relations with Iran.

The Iranian envoy's visit comes at a time of spiraling violence fueled by foreign extremists and rival groups of Sunnis and Shiites.