"We have never seen a minefield this big. It's huge," said the teams' leader, Captain Patrick Sullivan.

At least 500 of the mines, Italian-made devices designed to incapacitate or destroy tanks, had been laid by the Iraqis on top of the road surface in both directions of the dual carriageway for a distance of 1.3 kilometres (nearly a mile).

The US soldiers spent about four hours carefully roping the mines into clusters then delicately carrying them away to be destroyed with controlled blasts.

"The route from the city to the airport has been cleared," the commander of a tank brigade, Colonel William Grimsley, said.

He warned, though, that the road was not entirely safe.

"There remain pockets of Fedayeen and suicide bombers going on. But we own the ground," he said, explaining that up to 20 Iraqi fighters had been killed in the area on Wednesday.

Opening the road is crucial to US military operations to fly in materiel and humanitarian aid to Baghdad.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday that US aircraft were flying into the airport and that "humanitarian assistance is coming in".

The occupying troops have already started calling the facility "Baghdad International Airport" instead of its name before their arrival: Saddam International Airport.

Grimsley said several US military flights were expected at the airport on Friday.

SPACE.WIRE