BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – A suicide car bombing and clashes between Shiite militia and Iraqi security forces left at least 50 people dead Monday in a brutal contradiction of the prime minister’s claim that bloodshed was decreasing.

The deaths followed bombings and shootings Sunday that killed more than 60 people across the country, from the northern city of Kirkuk to Baghdad and Basra in the south.

The dead included eight American soldiers, one of the U.S. military’s deadliest weekends in months.

In the city of Diwaniyah, gunbattles between Iraqi forces and militiamen of the Mahdi Army loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr left at least 34 people dead and about 70 wounded, Iraqi officials said.

The fighting broke out late Sunday night when Iraqi soldiers conducted raids in three neighborhoods to flush out the militiamen and seize weapons, said army Capt. Fatik Aied.

He said the fighting continued Monday.

The al-Sadr representative in Diwaniyah, Sheik Abdul-Razaq al-Nidawi, told The Associated Press that “the Iraqi army pulled out of Diwaniya and the Mahdi army is in state of high alert.”

Dr. Mohammed Abdul-Muhsen of the city’s general hospital said 34 bodies were brought in _ 25 Iraqi soldiers, seven civilians and two militiamen. He said at least 70 people were injured.

Fatik said the militiamen were using rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles. At least 10 militiamen had been arrested, he said.

Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, is a Shiite-dominated city where the influence of the Mahdi Army has been gradually increasing. It already runs a virtual parallel government in Sadr City, a slum in eastern Baghdad.

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, has found it difficult to rein in al-Sadr, whose movement holds 30 of the 275 seats in parliament and five Cabinet posts.

Al-Sadr’s backing helped al-Maliki win the top job during painstaking negotiations within the Shiite alliance that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Al-Sadr mounted two major uprisings against the American-led coalition in 2004 after U.S. authorities closed his newspaper and pushed an Iraqi judge into issuing an arrest warrant against him.

American forces have been wary of confronting the Mahdi Army because of al-Sadr’s clout and his large following among Iraq’s Shiite majority.

Some 10,000 Iraqis have been killed in the last four months in unrelenting attacks by Sunni and Shiite extremists on each other’s communities, as well as bombings and shootings by Sunni Arab insurgents.

Midmorning Monday in Baghdad, when traffic is usually heavy, a suicide car bomber slammed into a police checkpoint outside the Interior Ministry. The blast, heard a mile away, killed 16 people, including 10 policemen, police 1st Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said. He said 18 policemen were among the 47 people wounded.

Elsewhere in the capital, a roadside bomb in the mainly Sunni western neighborhood of Jihad struck a car transporting five barbershop workers, killing one person and seriously wounding four, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.

The U.S. military said eight U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday and Sunday in and around Baghdad, seven of them by roadside bombs and one by gunfire. More than 2,600 U.S. military personnel have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.

U.S. military authorities said there was less violence than before.

“We have reduced the amount of violence,” military spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell told reporters in Baghdad. “We are actually seeing progress out there.”

“Whether it is shops opening, banks opening, neighborhood trash being removed, women and children moving about in their neighborhoods … Iraqi security forces are making progress,” he said.

The renewed violence nonetheless undercut al-Maliki’s claim that government forces were prevailing over insurgents and sectarian extremists.

“We’re not in a civil war. Iraq will never be in a civil war,” he said through an interpreter on CNN television Sunday. “The violence is in decrease and our security ability is increasing.”