About 20 insurgents, two US soldiers and an Iraqi mother were killed in overnight clashes near Kufa as tension flared again between US troops and Shia scholar Moqtada Sadr despite a five-day truce.
At least four people, including a woman and child, were killed and more than 20 wounded on Monday when at least one car bomb exploded in a western Baghdad neighbourhood, witnesses and hospital sources told AFP.
The blast devastated the house of Naim Haddad, a former senior Baath official from Saddam Hussein's regime, on Kindi street in the Harthiyah neighbourhood and sparked anti-US protests as troops moved in to secure the area.
An AFP reporter on the scene saw two bodies, one of which had been completely cut in half and the other torn to shreds.
At the nearby Yarmuk hospital, Doctor Adel Badawi said he had received "two bodies, a woman and a child" but stressed it was difficult to establish a definitive toll from the body parts scattered by the blast.
Commenting on an Arab television report that 20 of Sadr's militiamen were killed in the violence, a coalition official replied: "I think that number is close to being correct."
But Sadr's office said only two militiamen were killed and three wounded. The US military said its soldiers were killed in separate clashes near Kufa.
A 40-year-old Iraqi woman, Hamida Abbas Awda, was killed and three of her four children wounded when the family home was destroyed in the fighting, said an AFP photographer.
Her body lay wrapped in white cloth early Monday outside the rubble of her home as wailing and weeping relatives gathered around.
A neighbour, Alaa Abdul Hussein, said the clashes broke out around 11:00pm and lasted for about an hour.
Seven other Iraqis were also wounded in the fighting, two of them seriously, said a doctor in the city, which is considered a Sadr stronghold.
"Two Task Force 1st Armoured Division soldiers died in separate engagements south of Kufa the evening of May 30," the US army said in a statement.
"One soldier was killed when his patrol was ambushed with small arms fire and the other was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) struck his tank during a patrol," it added.
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