The US military and Iraqi medics gave differing version of the day's deadliest assault in the restive town of Ramadi, with hospital sources saying 13 civilians had been killed in a US air strike and a US spokesman saying eight rebels had been killed in a ground assault.
"US planes bombed a house in the Aziziyah area of Ramadi city centre, killing 13 civilians," Ali al-Obeidi, a medic at the Ramadi hospital told AFP, adding that four people were wounded.
US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson however said it was not an "air strike" but a ground assault on a building which killed eight rebels in Ramadi.
US-led forces respond
A US military statement said a team of marines were attacked "multiple times with rocket-propelled grenades, medium machine gun fire and small arms fire from a building near the Ramadi government center.
"The coalition forces responded with small arms fire, heavy machine gun fire, grenades and ground launched precision-guided munitions," it said.
Nine people were killed in the capital when a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a courthouse near the impoverished district of Sadr City in the second suicide attack to cause multiple deaths in Iraq in less than 24 hours.
A medic from Baghdad's Al-Kindi hospital said that two women and a child were among those killed in the attack near the stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Another 50 people were wounded.
In other attacks, Brigadier General Mohammed Raza Abdellatiff, who was in charge of logistics for the Iraqi army in Baghdad, was shot dead as he was driving to work.
Gunmen also killed a driver working with Baghdad's human rights ministry, and four other people were killed in other violence across the country.
Political wrangling
The latest bout of violence came as Iraq's dominant Shiite alliance said it would retain the crucial interior ministry in the next government while the former Sunni elite demanded at least five cabinet posts.
Prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki has until May 21 to name his line-up for the first permanent government of the post-Saddam Hussein era, with negotiations still going on almost five months after a December election.
Shiite MP Shirwan Alwali said the dominant Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, would retain the interior ministry which is tasked with managing security.
The current Shiite-run ministry has been accused by Sunni Arabs of operating squads that have indulged in extra-judicial killings of members of the once powerful community.
Hundreds of bodies of men shot dead execution-style have surfaced across Iraq since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the northern town of Samarra in February, leading to a sharp spike in sectarian violence.
Mr Maliki has said he expects the cabinet line-up to be ready by May 10, but Mr Alwali warned that his target may not be met and that negotiations were likely to go on for a while longer.