Fifty gunmen and 20 Iraqi soldiers have been killed in clashes in the town of Diwaniya south of Baghdad, the Ministry of Defence spokesman said on Monday.
Mohammed al-Askari said the fighting started on Sunday evening when the gunmen attacked police stations and army troops were sent in as reinforcements and eventually took control on Monday.
Iraqi army, police and hospital sources said earlier that the clashes were between militiamen loyal to radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi troops. A spokesman in Sadr's local office said only two of his militiamen were killed.
Sadr, a member of the ruling Shia Alliance, has staged armed revolts against US, British and Iraqi troops. Sunni Arab leaders accuse his Mehdi Army militiamen of running death squads, a charge they deny.
ROADSIDE BOMBS KILL FIVE US SOLDIERS: Roadside bombs killed five US soldiers in Iraq in separate attacks on Sunday. In one attack, four soldiers were killed when a blast hit their vehicle north of Baghdad, the US military said on Monday.
A roadside bomb, one of the most lethal weapons used by Sunni Arab insurgents seeking to topple the Shia-led government backed by Washington, also killed a US soldier in western Baghdad, said the military.
The American casualties came on a day when a spate of car bombings and shootings across Iraq killed about 60 people. In Khallis, a religiously mixed town, gunmen stormed a market and cafe, killing 16 people and wounding 25, police said. In one of the worst attacks of the day, a bomb blew apart a minibus in a busy commercial road in central Baghdad, killing nine people and sending black smoke billowing into the air.
The minibus blast followed a car bomb attack on Iraq's best-selling newspaper, the government-owned al-Sabah, that killed two employees and badly damaged the building.
In potentially oil rich Basra, where Maliki has imposed a state of emergency to deal with increasing violence fuelled by tensions between rival Shia Muslim factions, seven people were killed by a motorcycle bomb in a market, officials said.