Clashes between armed men and United States-Iraqi forces in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City resulted in 18 killed and 136 wounded, an Iraqi Health Ministry official said on Tuesday.
Saad al-Ameli said the casualty toll was a result of clashes overnight and Tuesday morning, and taken from reports in several hospitals in the capital.
Witnesses said clashes in Sadr City were ongoing and that US forces were using tanks to respond to gunshots from armed men.
Helicopters were seen hovering over the densely populated and impoverished Shi’ite district.
Al-Ameli also said another 11 Iraqis had been killed and 30 wounded in the 24-hour period until Tuesday morning in different clashes in Baghdad.
A spokesperson for radical Shi’ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr accused US forces of intentionally provoking the clashes in Sadr City.
Spokesperson Raed al-Kadhemi told al-Jazeera television that daily arrests and the entry of US tanks into the city provoked the clashes.
”This is a conspiracy against the city, which is considered the support base of Moqtada al-Sadr,” al-Kadhemi said.
Asked about the presence of weapons in Sadr City, al-Kadhemi told al-Jazeera that the agreement with the interim Iraqi government did not include handing over light weapons.
Meanwhile in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani urged a halt to fighting in all Iraqi cities.
A spokesperson for al-Sistani said the truce agreement brokered by the ayatollah included not just Najaf, but all Iraqi cities.
Al-Sistani brokered an agreement between al-Sadr and the interim Iraqi government to end three weeks of fighting in Najaf last month, which resulted in more than 500 dead and more than 700 wounded.
The governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidari, survived uninjured an assassination attempt on Tuesday when a bomb exploded near his convoy, reports said.
Al-Haidari told the Arabic channel al-Arabiya that he was on his way to work from his home in western Baghdad when his convoy was attacked.
Two Iraqis died in the attack and several people were wounded.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi Health Ministry source announced that the director of the Karama hospital in Baghdad was killed by unknown assailants at the hospital’s entrance.
The source said Abbas al-Husseini was killed on Tuesday morning while the armed men who shot at him managed to escape.
Elsewhere in Iraq the son of the Mosul governor died from his wounds on Tuesday after unknown assailants shot him near his house in downtown Mosul, a medical source said.
The source said Laith Duraid Kashmoulah died in Zahrawi hospital.
In Baquba, north of Baghdad, one Iraqi was killed on Monday night by a bomb that wounded three others, police said, while on Tuesday morning two policemen in Baquba were seriously injured by another explosive device.
Three US soldiers were killed by explosive devices that struck their convoys in the region around the Iraqi capital, the US military said on Tuesday.
Another US soldier was killed during an attack on a military convoy south of Mosul, bringing the total of US soldiers killed in the previous 24 hours to 13.
Overnight clashes between US troops and insurgents in Fallujah led to the death of one attacker and the wounding of two others, local police said. — Sapa-DPA