At least 13 people were killed in an air assault by US forces on a house in Iraq's restive city of Ramadi while 10 other Iraqis were killed in suicide bombing at a Baghdad courthouse yesterday.

"US planes bombed a house in Aziziyah area of Ramadi city centre, killing 13 civilians," Ali al-Obeidi, a medic at the Ramadi hospital told AFP, adding that four people were wounded.

The US military confirmed it had conducted the assault but did not give casualty figures.

Last month, US marines waged a fierce firefight with rebels who attacked government headquarters in Ramadi with car bombs, rockets and machine guns.

A suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a Baghdad courthouse on Thursday, killing 10 people, in the second suicide attack to cause multiple deaths in Iraq in less than 24 hours.

The bombing came as Iraq's dominant Shia alliance said it would retain the crucial interior ministry in the next government but political horsetrading continued with the former Sunni elite demanding at least five cabinet posts.

A medic from Baghdad's Al-Kindi hospital said that among the nine killed in the courthouse attack were two women and a child, while another 50 people were wounded.

The bomber struck near Baghdad's Sadr City, an impoverished district of the capital that is the stronghold of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

On Wednesday, at least 18 people were killed Wednesday when a suicide

bomber blew himself up amid dozens of police recruits in a queue outside police headquarters in the former Sunni rebel bastion of Fallujah west of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the US military on Thursday announced the death of a soldier killed Wednesday in a noncombat incident.

The latest fatality took the US military death toll in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 2,408, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.

A US civilian was killed and two others were wounded Wednesday when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, a British military spokesman said.