AFP reporters saw dozens of Iraqi military vehicles ablaze after US tanks and armoured vehicles ripped across Baghdad, turning everyday neighbourhoods into a war zone in their first ground thrust into the city.

Colonel David Perkins, commander of the Second Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division whose tanks pierced the heart of the capital, said Iraqi bodies were "all over the streets" and that he thought about 1,000 had been slain.

"It was hell," said Kamal, an electrician from the Yarmuk district in southwest Baghdad about 10 kilometres (six miles) from the city centre.

"The firepower was incredible. There was no let-up in the firing for three hours. Machine gun fire, light artillery and RPGs (Rocket-Propelled Grenades)," he said. "We were on a battlefield."

US Central Command said Iraq had been shown that US forces could enter the battered capital of Saddam's 24-year reign at will, even as Iraq's defiant information minister insisted Iraqi troops were repelling US soldiers.

"It was, I think, a clear statement of the ability of coalition forces to move into Baghdad at times and places of their choosing," Major General Vincent Renuart told reporters at the Central Command base in Qatar.

He said two task forces had punched north up to the Tigris River, where Saddam's battered presidential compound sits along the banks. They then veered west to the Baghdad airport now firmly in their control, where they were now positioned.

He insisted the fighting was "far from finished" and refused to say where US troops might still be in the city, if anywhere, but shrugged off reports from correspondents that US forces could not be seen after the raid.

"In some parts of downtown London, you can't see what's going on in other parts of downtown London," Renuart said.

He also dismissed Iraqi Information Minister Mohamed Said al-Sahhaf's claim that Republican Guards forces had ejected US forces from the Baghdad airport, where an AFP reporter on the scene said US troops were firmly in control.

The airport is "secure," he said.

Sahhaf repeatedly insisted that reports of the tightening military noose around the city were untrue and later read a speech on state television which he said was from Saddam, urging Iraqis to rise up across the country.

"The enemy has concentrated all its forces against Baghdad, which has weakened its power in other parts of Iraq," he said. "Go all out at the enemy to destroy them, following the orders in the written plans they have received".

Renuart said US forces had met with "intense fighting" in some areas of Baghdad, as both regular forces and some Republican Guards unleashed anti-aircraft fire directly on them, as well as rifles and RPGs.

But he said that in other parts of the city of five million people, where water and electricity cuts have resulted from two and a half weeks of punishing air strikes, "people were standing on the sidewalks waving to us."

He added: "So clearly there is confusion in Baghdad. Clearly there is some chaos in terms of the command and control."

The commander of the air campaign, Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley, told reporters in Washington: "The Iraqi military as an organized defense in large combat formations doesn't really exist anymore."

Perkins said the US forces destroyed about 100 pieces of Iraqi equipment, including air defence systems, tanks, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, recoilless rifles and guided anti-tank missiles.

"It's called 'let me poke you in the eye because we can and you can't do anything about it,'" Colonel Will Grimsley, commander of the First Brigade of the US Army's Third Infantry Division, told AFP.

AFP reporters heard artillery fire booming on the edge of the Yarmuk and Doha neighbourhoods along the road leading to Baghdad airport, seized by US troops on Friday, and huge fireballs were seen over the airport.

There was no overall word on American casualties but US officers said a US tank commander was shot and killed, and two other soldiers wounded, in Baghdad.

Two pilots were also killed Saturday when their AH-1W "Super Cobra" attack helicopter crashed in central Iraq. Three US soldiers were killed in a vehicle accident Friday at the airport.

Outside Baghdad, Thorp said, US marines pushing up from the southeast were clashing with the Al-Nida division of Iraq's elite Republican Guard. "They moved into their midst and are engaging them," he said.

Elsewhere, Major Mike Slocum told AFP that Black Hawk, Chinook and Apache helicopters were transporting more than a battalion of soldiers into the outskirts of the southern holy city of Karbala.

Central Command said Friday that US and coalition forces had control of the roads in and out of Iraq as well as the route between Baghdad and Tikrit, Saddam's hometown to the northeast and a key seat of his tribal support.

In northern Iraq, US special forces and Iraqi Kurd rebels have cut off the southern exits from the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, and are operating within five kilometers (three miles) of the strategic northern city, Kurdish military sources said Saturday.

The officials from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said two main highways leading south of Kirkuk were unusable by Iraqi forces, and that most of the Iraqi army units had pulled back within city limits.

A British officer in Kuwait told AFP that forces have found 200 coffins containing human remains stashed in bags at a former army barracks in the southern Iraq town of Al Zubayr.

"We found approximately 200 coffins, each containing bags, each labelled, and each bag contained human remains," he said.

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