"There is no doubt the Republican Guards to the north need to be dealt with," as the allies move to assert control over all of Iraq, said Ian Kemp, news editor for the prestigious military magazine Jane's Defence Weekly.

He said the city of Tikrit, the hometown and a bastion of fallen Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "needs to be dealt with as well."

David Blair, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, said in a report from the region that even if Saddam is dead "his clansman around Tikrit may try to hold out, for no other reason than a deep and justified fear of the vengeance their fellow Iraqis may wreak now that Saddam's protection has been lifted."

There is no doubt, however, that the back of the Iraqi army has been broken with the British and US victories in the southern city of Basra and Baghdad.

Kemp said the coalition forces are already changing their mission to look towards "a peace support operation," particularly with troops expected to be called on to keep looting from getting out of hand.

"This is going to be a crucial phase as the coalition seeks to avoid a power vacuum in cities across the country and to get the flow of humanitarian aid established as soon as possible," Kemp said.

But William Hopkinson of the London think tank the Royal Institute of International Affiars warned the allies are less well equipped for peacekeeping as "there aren't really enough troops on the ground."

"Think of Bosnia, it was a much smaller country and there were four divisions of peacekeepers," he said.

That is about the total strength of allied forces, and Iraq is a much bigger country, Hopkinson said.

"It's still pretty tight in terms of a peacekeeping operation," he said.

Militarily, the allies will be reinforcing northern Iraq with the US's high-tech 4th Infantry Division, which is assembling in Kuwait after it was unable to deploy ahead of the war that began March 20 by deploying through Turkey.

Kemp said whatever further fighting they face is "going to depend on the will of the Iraqis to resist," an uncertain factor with the central government in Baghdad having fallen.

He said before the war the elite Republican Guards had only six divisions, about 60,000 men, with a total of 400 tanks.

The two remaining Republican Guard divisions "are likely to have less than 100 tanks each," he said.

To the north of these divisions are three corps of the Iraqi army, which could total up to 60,000 troops, but these soldiers were already losing ground rapidly to Kurdish fighters working with US special forces.

Kemp said a motiviation for the Republican Guards to fight is that "some of these people are considered war criminals and criminals within Iraq."

Hopkinson said if the Iraqis had been unable "to make a go of it with all their advantages around Baghdad," they would have no chance outside the capital.

He said the Iraqis have lost the urban fighting advantages a large city like Baghdad gave and that in a smaller, less strategic city like Tikrit "the Americans could stand off and blast them until they surrendered or gave up."

An Iraqi division, even the Republican Guards, "out in the open would be chewed up" by allied forces, he added.

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