The Iraqi regime headed into a third week of war voicing undying defiance, as the aerial blitz of Baghdad appeared to grow heavier and US ground forces closed in on the battered capital.

Witnesses reported US shells raining down on the airport, which lies just 20 kilometers (12 miles) from central Baghdad, and dozens of people killed or wounded.

When asked whether US-led forces controlled the airport, Major Morris Goins, operations officer for the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division said: "We own part of it".

AFP correspondents in the city center heard a series of violent blasts from the area of the airport beginning at about 1:30 am (2130 GMT).

Earlier, AFP journalists reported a continuous barrage of pounding fire that appeared to be coming from the southwestern Iraqi defense lines at about 8:00 pm (1700 GMT) in Baghdad, most of which was plunged into darkness following a power cut 30 minutes later.

Information Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf had earlier dismissed statements by US commanders and reports from AFP journalists on the ground with US troops that American forces were now on the outskirts of Baghdad and very close to the city's airport.

He told reporters here that US troops were "not even 100 miles" from Baghdad, but said Thursday's air strikes in and around the city had killed 27 civilians and wounded 193.

"The airport is safe," Muafiq Abdullah al-Jaburi, manager of Saddam International, told journalists escorted there by the information ministry Thursday afternoon.

"Maybe the Americans occupied another airport in the desert," he joked.

In the capital itself several large explosions were heard in the city centre around 2:30 am Friday (2230 GMT Thursday) as warplanes flew overhead, an AFP correspondent said.

A number of explosions also rocked the northwest outskirts of the capital about 20 minutes later.

A statement attributed to President Saddam Hussein and read on state television Thursday said Iraqi forces would never let the capital be taken.

"Many thousands of soldiers are defending the homeland ... and they will not allow them to go into Baghdad without defeating and repelling them," the statement vowed.

It said barely a third of Iraq's forces had yet been engaged in battle.

Saddam himself was seen on Iraqi satellite television later, chairing a meeting and vowing that victory against the advancing US-British forces was certain.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz vowed that advancing US-led forces would not be able to take over Baghdad and promised a "huge and costly" war.

"Baghdad is well-defended, and it will be a huge, costly war with us, if they approach Baghdad," Aziz said in an interview in the Iraqi capital with the Italian network RAI UNO.

Iraq has repeatedly warned that the war's decisive battle will be in Baghdad, where it could engage US-led forces in bloody street-to-street fighting. It also says it has thousands of volunteers ready to become "martyrs" in suicide strikes.

AFP reporters in Baghdad since the war began said the bombardment of the city has been more intense in recent days and that on Thursday afternoon it was unusually heavy. Massive explosions boomed from the southern outskirts.

Saddam's elite Republican Guard forces are said to be outside the city to the south, defending the capital from US and British troops that have been sweeping northward.

Iraq has denied US claims that two Guard divisions have been devastated by the air assault, which US commanders say has been intended to weaken the dug-in units of the 60,000-strong Guard.

More and more trenches filled with fuel have been set ablaze around the city in an effort to hamper the visibility of coalition pilots, giving off thick black clouds and rendering the air noxious.

The US and British bombing has racked up mounting civilian casualty tolls.

In the latest incident, eight civilians died and five were wounded Thursday by a missile that hit a vegetable market at Nahrawan on the southeastern edge of Baghdad, an Iraqi hospital source said.

US Central Command said it was investigating the incident, saying it had no information on it.

The wives and children of two close aides to Saddam Hussein's elder son Uday were killed in a US-British air strike on a farm north of Baghdad, relatives said.

SPACE.WIRE