Saturday 07 June 2014 16.07 Gunmen have occupied a university in Iraq's western Anbar province, taking hundreds of students and their professors hostage.
This the third attack this week by militants who overran parts of two other cities.
After fighting their way past guards overnight, the gunmen broke into Anbar University in the provincial capital Ramadi.
Parts of Ramadi have been held by anti-government tribesmen and insurgents since the start of the year.
Security forces surrounded the university in Ramadi and exchanged fire with the militants.
The militants had planted bombs behind them and were patrolling the rooftops with sniper rifles.
Sources in Ramadi hospital said they had received the bodies of two people, one of them a student and the other a policeman.
A professor trapped inside the physics department said some staff who live outside Ramadi had been spending the night at the university because it was the exam period.
The identity of the assailants was not clear, but Ramadi is one of two cities in Anbar that were overrun at the start of the year by tribal and Sunni insurgents, including the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Security forces are in control of central Ramadi, but the suburbs and outlying areas have swung back and forth between them and the militants.
The city of Falluja around 50km away is still in insurgent hands.
One of the guards at the university said he believed themilitants' real aim was to seize an area called Humaira behind the campus, which would allow them to set up supply lines between Ramadi and Falluja.
In December, a crisis broke out in the desert province of Anbar, west of Baghdad, when security forces dismantled a longstanding Sunni Arab protest camp near provincial capital Ramadi.
Anti-government fighters subsequently seized control of parts of Ramadi and all of Fallujah, to its east, and security forces have so far failed to drive them out.
The United Nations said yesterday that the conflict in Anbar is believed to have forced nearly 480,000 people from their homes.
They join about 1.1 million others displaced by past years of violence in Iraq.
Violence there is running at its highest levels since 2006-2007, when tens of thousands were killed in sectarian conflict between Iraq's Shia majority and Sunni Arab minority.
More than 900 people were killed last month, according to figures separately compiled by the United Nations and the government.
So far this year, more than 4,300 people have been killed, according to AFP figures.
Officials blame external factors for the rise in bloodshed, particularly the civil war in neighbouring Syria.
However, analysts say widespread Sunni Arab anger with the Shia-led government has also been a major factor.
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