BAGHDAD, Iraq — The U.S. Army said they were militants. Sadr City residents said at least some were civilians, and photographs showed the dust-covered body of at least one child being pulled from a mountain of rubble after yesterday’s fighting.

Whatever the facts, at least 28 people were dead after the four-hour battle, the latest deadly showdown between American and Iraqi forces and Shiite Muslim militiamen over recent weeks.

Based on the photographs, it appeared that at least one of the dead was a civilian. In its captions, the Associated Press identified the boy in the bloodied shorts being carried from the ruins of a house as 2-year-old Ali Hussein.

The brother-in-law of an Iraqi journalist who works with the Los Angeles Times also was reported killed. The victim recently had moved his immediate family out of the neighborhood because of the fighting.

The journalist, reached by phone Tuesday night, said he was at the funeral and could not speak.

The destruction and death toll underscored the intensity of fighting in Sadr City, where American forces are pursuing militants who often operate from the narrow alleyways and crowded residential sectors of the sprawling Shiite stronghold. Clashes have occurred there nearly every day since the end of March, when an Iraqi military crackdown on Shiite militias sparked an uprising by fighters loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

With many of Sadr City’s main roads peppered with roadside bombs and its side streets too narrow for American tanks or other heavy vehicles to navigate, American forces often call in airstrikes or use guided rockets to hit their targets.

Locals say civilians often are caught in the chaos.

The military says it does everything it can to avoid this. In a statement yesterday, a military spokesman responded angrily to the accusations that troops had killed civilians in the latest battle.

“The rockets struck militants firing from buildings, alleyways and rooftops,” Lieutenant Colonal Steven Stover wrote in an e-mail response to questions. “We are not targeting law-abiding civilians. Those targeted were firing weapons at U.S. soldiers.”

Colonel Stover said the clashes began in the late morning as troops evacuating an American soldier wounded by small-arms fire came under attack. Two bombs followed by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade blasts targeted the vehicle trying to get the wounded man to safety, Colonel Stover said.

A third bomb hit another vehicle. American forces responded with guided rockets launched from the ground. Colonel Stover denied locals’ claims that helicopters fired on them from the air.

He said six Americans were injured in the fighting, but none of their injuries was life-threatening.

A resident of Sector 10 where the violence occurred, Abu Ahmed, said two rockets hit the neighborhood, where many of the small homes are crowded with three or four families living together.

He said the first rocket demolished several homes in the middle of a block.

“When some people rushed to evacuate the people and the families who were killed or injured, they were attacked by another rocket,” Mr. Ahmed said. He said a friend named Sameer and several of his relatives were among the dead.

Violence also rocked Iraq’s Sunni Muslim stronghold of Diyala province, north of Baghdad. Police said a female suicide bomber blew herself up in the village of Mukhisa, killing one person and injuring five. The victims were members of the local Awakening movement, which consists of people who have volunteered to work alongside American and Iraqi forces to fight insurgents.

In Baghdad, assassins killed the director-general of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Dhia Jodi Jaber. Some reports said he was shot to death while in his motorcade, but others said a roadside bomb had killed him.

The trial for one of the best-known members of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, a former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, got under way in Baghdad but was adjourned until May 20. He is appearing before a special tribunal created to handle cases involving members of Saddam’s ousted regime.

[Also yesterday, an Army medic testified at a court-martial that after he told his sergeant a wounded insurgent was going to die, the sergeant ordered him to suffocate the Iraqi and then killed the man himself, the Associated Press reported.

Sergeant Leonardo Trevino faces murder and other charges in the death of the man at Muqdadiyah, Iraq, in June 2007.]