A provincial governor managed to escape an assassination bid, however was one of 50 people wounded.
Around 30 rebels, armed with mortars and anti-tank weapons as well as small arms, took part in the deadliest assault, an attack on a police checkpoint in ethnically-mixed Diyala province northeast of the capital, police said.
A roadside bomb exploded near the convoy of Diyala province governor Rashid Mula al-Timimi, in northeast Baquba, who was injured and one of his guards killed, said officials.
Five police were killed and another four wounded in the morning assault in the village of Buhruz, just outside the provincial capital of Baquba.
Police said they killed six insurgents.
Gunmen later opened fire on the car of local councillor Suad Jaafari, a member of the main Shiite alliance, killing her and three bodyguards.
Hours later, a Shiite politician from the largest party within the ruling alliance, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was shot while in a taxi in Najaf.
Gunmen also killed Noufel Ahmed Hassan, a lecturer at the Institute of Fine Arts, as he was leaving his home in Baghdad for work.
In Fallujah, a suicide bomber's explosive vest failed to detonate properly at a checkpoint to the entrance of the city, prompting US marines to shoot him.
A US soldier died when a rocket-propelled grenade hit his patrol vehicle in Baghdad, bringing the number of American troops killed in the Iraq war to 2167.
The violence came as the United States' top general acknowledged that Iraqis wanted coalition troops to go home "as soon as possible" and said US troop levels in Iraq were now being re-assessed on a monthly basis.
The admission by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Marine General Peter Pace followed a decision by the Pentagon to reduce the current level of 160,000 soldiers in Iraq by two army brigades, which amounts to about 7,000 soldiers.
The daily death toll since the landmark December 15 parliamentary elections has been averaging nearly a dozen as insurgents target the fledgling security forces and other symbols of the new Iraq.
In an attack with a different kind of symbolism, assailants killed one and wounded two by firing rocket propelled grenades at a gas station in Kirkuk, a northern town where the insurgent Ansar al-Sunna group warned against implementing government-mandated price hikes.
The tripling of Iraq's heavily subsidized gasoline price has sparked demonstrations in several Iraqi provinces.
Meanwhile, Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko arrived in Iraq for a surprise visit as his country wrapped up a withdrawal of most of its troops.