"The toppling of Saddam," thundered identical headlines in three broadsheet British newspapers emblazoned with photographs of a giant statue of the Iraqi leader in Baghdad being torn down by US troops and jubilant Iraqis.

"Statue of Liberty" said both The Sun newspaper, Britain's biggest selling daily, and its rival Daily Mirror, the paper most vocally opposed to the war.

The triumphant note was echoed across the channel despite deep differences over the US-led war, where the tabloid France Soir heralded "The end of the dictator" while the right-wing Le Figaro said simply: "Baghdad has fallen."

But just one day after the fall of the capital to US forces on day 21 of the war, US Marines came under heavy fire in Baghdad Thursday and in a worrying sign of potential trouble ahead, looters rampaged through the city.

And against the deeply symbolic photographs of the toppled statue, Europe's press pondered the fate of Saddam himself after 24 years of iron rule.

"The conflict is not yet over," cautioned The Times of London.

Drawing parallels with their own past, Germany's newspapers hailed the collapse of the regime, but warned that there was a long road ahead to rebuild the country after Saddam's rule and 13 years of sanctions.

Pictures of Iraqis furiously hacking at Saddam's towering statue revived memories of East Germans pickaxing the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the communist regimes of eastern Europe crumbled one after another.

"The fall of a despicable dictator is a cause for joy for every democrat," wrote the centre-left Tagesspiegel daily.

The mass-selling Bild said the image of cheering Iraqis was at last fulfilling the hopes of the US-led forces.

"The regime is collapsing, the chains of dictatorship are being broken. The statues of Saddam are tumbling, as those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Milosevic did before them."

But it warned: "We know, we Germans, that the war will not be finished until freedom and order are joined. The road ahead is long. But in Iraq, the end is in sight."

And the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine said the surprisingly rapid collapse of the regime "should not lead to the conclusion that democracy will rise out of the ruins like a new building."

"When the smoke of war has dissipated, conflicts will emerge again between Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs. There is much work for the experienced European constructors of civilian societies.

The message was similar in Russia.

US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair "can celebrate, they have kept their word and won the war, overthrowing a bloody regime" while avoiding a bloodbath, the centrist Izvestia wrote. "But the hardest and the most dangerous part is only now beginning."

"Will the allies bring peace to the conquered country? Will they install a real government, and not just a handful of puppets? Will they prevent a civil war, prevent the growth of radical Islam, avoid an arbitrary terrorist reaction?"

The pro-Kremlin daily Vremya Novostei hailed "one of the fastest and most successful military operations in an urban area in history," but noted that the US tanks were bringing in their wake "an interim occupation administration" in which "US troops will be regarded as occupying forces."

And in the very near future, coalition forces will have to deal with Shiite and Kurdish ambitions, frustrated by decades of abuse by a regime dominated by the country's Sunni minority, it noted.

"The victory and its challenges," was the headline over an editorial by the director of Italy's La Repubblica, Ezio Mauro, describing the war as a "dangerous error" as it was launched without UN backing.

"With the war won, Bush and Blair must now hand over to the United Nations and a European political platform to render Iraq truly democratic and autonomous after freeing it from the dictator," Mauro wrote.

In Sweden, leading daily Dagens Nyheter stressed that six conditions were still needed "to justify the US-led campaign that a majority of the world's country have opposed".

In an editorial titled "Baghdad after Saddam", it listed the conditions as: "the capture of Iraq's leadership dead or alive; order restored; Iraqis welcoming the liberation; convincing evidence that Iraq had or had the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction; a political process toward self-rule; and the support of the UN."

The paper said the Bush administration "deserved recognition" for its victory over the regime but said "the vague American idea of creating a better future with tanks and idealism still has the odds piled against it in Iraq".

Sweden's Conservative daily Svenska Dagbladet stressed that most important was that Saddam be found "dead or alive".

"It is important in order to have an end to the war and to win the peace," it wrote in an editorial under the headline "The curse is broken in Iraq."

SPACE.WIRE