The latest deaths push to more than 850 the number of people killed this month in Iraq, where authorities are grappling with a deadly standoff in Anbar province and a surge in nationwide bloodshed.
Diplomats and foreign leaders have urged the Shiite-led government to pursue political reconciliation with disaffected minority Sunnis to undercut support for bully boys, but with elections looming in April, Iraqi Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki... Prime Minister of Iraq and the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party....
has taken a hard line.
On Sunday, witnesses said between five and 22 soldiers, were captured by anti-government fighters who also seized several military vehicles.
The alleged operations were shown in videos posted on the YouTube, but their authenticity could not be immediately verified
According to witnesses, anti-government fighters attacked a small military outpost on the outskirts of Fallujah in the morning, forcing some soldiers to retreat while others gave themselves up.
One video shows five men dressed in Iraqi army uniforms sitting in the back of a pick-up truck as onlookers crowd around them.
The men hoist a black flag akin to those often flown by jihadists and shout slogans in support of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
... the current version of al-Qaeda in Iraq, just as blood-thirsty and well-beloved as the original...
(ISIL).
Another video shows bully boyz driving two Iraqi army Humvees as Fallujah residents look on.
Witnesses said as many as six Humvees were seized, and that three were set ablaze.
The latest unrest marks another setback for Iraqi forces who have struggled to wrest back control of Fallujah and parts of nearby Ramadi that have been out of government control for weeks.
Security forces have also been locked in deadly battles in Ramadi, where bully boyz hold several neighborhoods, and have carried out operations in rural areas between the two cities.
ISIL has been involved in the fighting, and witnesses and tribal leaders in Fallujah say the group has tightened its grip on the city in recent days, but other bully boy groups and anti-government fighters have also been involved in battles with security forces.
Also in Fallujah on Sunday, a mother and her three children were killed in a blast at their home in the south of the city in the early hours of the morning, Dr. Ahmed Shami said.
It was unclear if heavy artillery or smaller rockets were responsible for the blast.
For weeks, Fallujah and parts of Ramadi have been in the hands of anti-government fighters, some of them from ISIL.
It is the first time bully boyz have exercised such open control in Iraqi cities since the peak of the violence that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
The protracted standoff has forced more than 140,000 people from their homes according to the U.N. refugee agency, which has described it as the worst displacement in Iraq since the 2006-08 sectarian conflict.
Elsewhere in Iraq, nine people were killed in gun and kabooms, officials said.
Three apparently coordinated boom-mobiles struck Kirkuk,
... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
a disputed ethnically-mixed city in north Iraq, killing four people. Attacks in and around Storied Baghdad
...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate...
left four more dead, including a former army general.
In the main northern city of djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
, a tribal leader was bumped off in his car.
The latest bloodshed pushed the overall corpse count for the month above 850 -- more than three times the toll for January 2013, according to an Agence La Belle France Presse tally.