Baghdad, Iraq ? U.S. soldiers killed 14 insurgents in two days of fighting in a strategic northern city, the American military said Monday, and gunmen killed 10 Iraqi soldiers in the central Sunni heartland.

A hard-line Sunni clerical group accused Iraqi government commandos of torturing and killing 10 Sunni Arab civilians in Baghdad, fueling sectarian tensions between the country’s two major religious groups.

Soldiers of the U.S. 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment killed four insurgents in a gunbattle Sunday, and 10 more were killed Monday as fighting raged in Tal Afar, 260 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. command reported. American troops suffered no casualties, the statement said.

However, insurgents bloodied an Iraqi force in Khalis, 45 miles north of Baghdad. Guerrillas firing mortars, machine guns and semiautomatic weapons stormed an Iraqi checkpoint about 5 a.m., killing eight Iraqi soldiers, Khalis police chief Col. Mahdi Saleh said.

About 90 minutes later, a car bomb exploded a few miles away as an Iraqi army patrol passed, killing two soldiers, Saleh said. Two soldiers and three civilians were wounded in the attacks.

Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attacks in a Web statement, but the authenticity of the posting could not be confirmed.

With hands left bloody after moving a family member who was killed in a suicide bomb attack Sunday in Baghdad, Iraqis lift a coffin onto the roof of their car Monday at a morgue.

Two U.S. Marines were killed Sunday by “indirect fire” – presumably mortar shells – in the insurgent stronghold of Hit, the U.S. command said. Hit is on the Euphrates River in western Iraq, along another major route from Syria.

On Monday, an influential Sunni clerical organization accused Iraqi security forces of detaining, torturing and killing 10 Sunnis in Baghdad. Government officials had no comment, but a doctor at Yarmouk hospital confirmed receiving the bodies, which he said showed signs of abuse. The doctor spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal.

The Association of Muslim Scholars said members of an Interior Ministry commando brigade detained the men Sunday as they visited relatives in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Shula.

“The men were taken to a detention center where they were tortured, then locked in a container where they suffocated,” the association said.

However, the doctor said one of the men was killed and the other nine detained after the troops came under fire Sunday in Shula.