Not only did they drive 30 tanks deep into the legendary city, they left in their wake a trail of devastation which augurs ill for Iraq's continued defence.

US tanks appeared to have made light of a ferocious blockade put up by the outgunned Iraqis on the airport road.

Army trucks, armoured personnel carriers as well as jeeps mounted with anti-aircraft guns were abandoned, some burning and others smoking on the main road leading to a power station and on nearby sidestreets in the outlying Dora and Yarmuk areas.

Having captured Saddam International Airport on Friday, and quickly renamed it Baghdad International, the Americans decided they need wait no longer.

"It's called 'let me poke you in the eye because we can and you can't do anything about it'," said Colonel Will Grimsley, commander of the division's First Brigade.

Ignoring dire predictions in the Arab world that entry into Baghdad would start an Islamist tidal wave as well as undying resistance by the populace, his tanks had "looped through the city center" in a show of force on the 17th day of the war.

Adding insult to injured Iraqi pride, US spokesmen suggested Baghdad, for long a cultural, political and economic giant of the Arab world, was all but under control already and that any resistance was only sporadic.

"We have had troops that are approaching the heart of the city," said Ensign David Luckett, a spokesman for the US Central Command.

"They are conducting patrols and operations in Baghdad and have encountered sporadic resistance."

That may have included a heavy dose of wishful-thinking. AFP reporters touring the capital could find no further evidence of a US presence by early afternoon.

But Navy Captain Frank Thorp, at US Central Command's forward planning base in Qatar went further, saying US troops were staying in the city.

"This wasn't a patrol -- go in and come out," he said. "This is part of the (US Army's) Fifth Corps moving into the city."

"We've moved pretty much into the middle of the city," Thorp said.

Iraqi ministers have spent months talking up Baghdad as "impregnable" and threatening an early grave for anyone bold enough to question their word.

Hints that chemical weapons might finally be deployed flew thick and fast, and US officials certainly took them seriously, down to announcing that coalition forces had crossed a "red line" on the advance on Baghdad inside of which they feared the use of weapons of mass destruction.

All that was on offer Saturday from the regime was a claim that US troops had already been chased out of the airport.

"They set fire to a taxi," Information Minister Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf summed up when queried by reporters about Saturday's battle.

Noises from the US army and witness reports from the scene suggested otherwise and the fall of the regime looked only a matter of time.

Historians, weighing the might of today's US hyperpower, recall that the forces of the British empire took control of Baghdad in 1917 and again in 1941 -- the last occupation of the capital founded on the banks of the Tigris in 762 and called City of Peace.

It is more than seven centuries since the bloody Mongol sacking of the old seat of the caliphate by Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, on February 10,

After a siege lasting several weeks, the Mongols stayed for decades.

SPACE.WIRE