Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's rule collapsed today as US tanks rolled into central Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein's rule over Iraq collapsed today as US troops swept into the heart of Baghdad.
Marines helped jubilant residents celebrate by toppling a huge statue of their ousted leader and dragging its severed head through the streets.
Amid chaotic scenes of rejoicing, looting and scattered gunfire, Iraqis danced and trampled on the fallen 20-foot high metal statue in contempt for the man who had held them in fear for 24 years in which the country sustained massive human losses and economic damage from three wars.
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"We control the vast majority of the city but there's stillfighting going on," Lieutenant General Buford Blount, commander ofthe Third Infantry Division, told journalists. He said only irregular forces such as the Fedayeen and Baath Party militiamen were fighting on the Iraqi side.
"The end of the combat phase is days away. There may be more combat in the north but in Baghdad and the south the end of the combat phase is days away," Lt Gen Blount added. "We have been in all the government buildings and there is no government left to speak of."
But US control over the city was still not complete. As night fell, the streets emptied and tank and artillery fire sounded on the western bank of the Tigris river.
There was no word on the fate of Saddam or his sons, targeted by US planes that bombed a western residential area of the city on Monday. A CIA official said he did not know if the Iraqi leader had survived the attack.
US-led forces have yet to occupy northern cities such as Mosul, Kirkuk and Tikrit, Saddam's birthplace and tribal power base, 110 miles north of the capital. US and Kurdish forces dislodged Iraqis from a mountain used to defend Mosul, their biggest victory yet in the north.
Earlier, in scenes recalling the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Iraqis hacked at the marble plinth of Saddam's statue with a sledgehammer. Youths hooked a noose around the statue's neck and attached the rope to a Marine armored vehicle, which dragged it over.
The scenes came three weeks after US President George W. Bush began the war to topple Saddam and seize control of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's government denied having any such weapons and so far there is no definitive word that any have been found, although US experts are testing some suspicious substances discovered earlier this week.
The war has so far cost 96 US dead, 30 British dead and unknown thousands of Iraqi military and civilian casualties. It has left behind a heavily damaged country which faces growing humanitarian needs. As Marines drove into Baghdad through the vast eastern township of Saddam City, home to about two million impoverished Shi'ite Muslims, jubilant crowds threw flowers and cheered. "No more Saddam Hussein," chanted one group, waving to troops as they passed. "We love you, we love you."
US soldiers briefly draped a Stars and Stripes flag on the face of the giant Saddam statue as they prepared to topple it. It was quickly replaced with an Iraqi flag that was placed on the plinth. The war has provoked enormous Arab anger and resentment and any display of the US flag could add to those feelings.
Top US officials held off from a victory dance and cautioned that the Iraq war was not over yet.
Still, a wave of euphoria swept through the administration as Mr Bush and almost everybody else tuned in to the dramatic television images. Mr Bush saw the beginning of efforts to drag down the statue on television before going into meetings. When the meetings were over, the statue had been toppled.
"He watched it dragged through the streets of Baghdad. He walked out, saw it on the ground and exclaimed, 'They got it down'," said White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer.
The most triumphant note came from US DefenCe Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a key architect of the war. "Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators, and the Iraqi people are well on their way to freedom," he declared.
He warned that "difficult and very dangerous days" laid ahead in which fighting would continue. "We still must capture, account for or otherwise deal with Saddam Hussein, his sons and the senior Iraqi leadership," he told a Pentagon briefing.
Vice President Dick Cheney told a meeting of US newspaper editors in New Orleans that US and Iraqi officials would meet soon to begin planning for an interim Iraqi government.
The United States plans to install a civil administration under a retired US General to prepare for the eventual creation of an interim government run by the Iraqis.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said it was too early to declare military victory in Iraq. "This conflict is not over yet. There is still resistance, not broadly spread among the Iraqi people, but among those parts of Saddam's regime that want to cling on to power," he said.
Sporadic shooting in parts of Baghdad prompted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to suspend its operations, citing "chaotic and unpredictable" conditions and the death of a staffer on Tuesday.
As word of events in Baghdad spread, rejoicing crowds took to the streets in the Kurdish-held northern city of Arbil. Iraqi Kurds hate Saddam for his ferocious campaigns against them. His forces used poison gas on Halabja and other Kurdish towns in 1988 in a crackdown that killed tens of thousands.