After the United States boldly declared that the sprawling airport on the western outskirts of the capital no longer bore his name, Saddam was shown by state television on a triumphant tour of battered Baghdad, where a new round of loud explosions could be heard in the early hours Saturday.

The uniformed Saddam, accompanied by his personal secretary, Abed Hmoud, in broad daylight, was repeatedly swarmed by the crowd, which chanted, "With our blood and our souls, we shall redeem you!"

It was the first apparently fresh footage of Saddam in public since the United States and Britain launched the war on March 20 aimed at toppling him.

The footage was aired by state television hours after Saddam delivered a speech in which he urged Baghdad residents, "Hit them with the power of faith wherever they come near you, and resist."

"Our martyrs will go to heaven and their dead will go to hell," he said.

The US military tried to downplay the significance of Saddam's appearances.

"We find it interesting that Saddam Hussein, if he is alive, feels a need to walk in the streets to prove that," Major General Stanley McChrystal, vice director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Washington.

"What we don't see is effective command and control at his level," he said.

The Iraqi leader was last seen in public in 2001. Western intelligence believes the 65-year-old leader uses a number of doubles as a security precaution.

Earlier in the day the US-led coalition said it had seized Saddam International Airport and had stripped it of the Iraqi leader's name.

Besides its obvious symbolic value, the airport could be used as a base for US forces ahead of a battle in Baghdad.

Information Minister Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf issued an ominous warning that Iraq would carry out a "not conventional" attack later against US troops he said were "isolated" at the airport.

"I mean some kind of martyrdom, and there are very very new ways which we are going to carry out," said Sahhaf, whose country says it has thousands of volunteers ready for suicide attacks.

"They're leeches, animals and rats. They will only leave the airport alive if they surrender," Sahhaf told reporters.

The commander of British forces in the Gulf, Air Marshal Brian Burridge, told the BBC that could mean "an attack with chemical or biological weapons," whose alleged possession by Iraq was a stated reason for the war.

Or, he said, Iraq could try to swarm the airport with a "human tide."

"We had signs last night (Thursday) that there were loudspeakers in southwest Baghdad signalling people should rise up and march on the airport," he said.

The official news agency INA, meanwhile, said a suicide attack against US troops was carried out by two women, whose testimonies were aired on the Arabic-language satellite television Al-Jazeera.

"I vow ... to be a suicide bomber who will defend Iraq," said one of the women, named as Nur al-Shammari, seen raising a rifle in the air and with her other hand placed on a Koran, the Muslim holy book.

"We are going to take revenge on the enemies of the nation, Americans, imperialists, the British and Arabs that gave themselves over to foreigners," she warned.

The imagery of the videotapes was strikingly similar to footage of Palestinian suicide bombers who have carried out devastating attacks against Israeli targets.

US Central Command said three coalition soldiers, a pregnant woman and her driver were killed in the explosion Thursday night at a checkpoint near Hadithah Dam, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) northwest of Baghdad.

It did not say whether it was a suicide attack although the circumstances were similar to those of a suicide car bomb blast on March 29.

That incident prompted a dramatic increase in US and British ground forces' security posture, treating civilians as potential attackers.

Late Friday, a missile slammed into central Baghdad, shortly after a plane overflew the capital and drew heavy anti-aircraft fire. Smoke was seen billowing in the sky but it was not clear where exactly the missile crashed.

The roads to Baghdad were ablaze and little was left of the encampments of the elite Republican Guard guarding approaches to the capital, said a US Navy pilot who returned to his carrier from a bombing mission over Iraq's capital.

Inside Baghdad, electricity, water and telephone service remained scant, although power returned late Friday in the center of the city after a day-long outage.

Streetlamps were on again in the district surrounding the main presidential palace, a frequent target of coalition air strikes, and nearby homes and businesses also had their power restored.

The government ordered Baghdad residents, businesses and government bodies with electric generators to keep them running overnight, saying it was "important that Baghdad glow with light" to make life easier "for people in these difficult conditions."

SPACE.WIRE