They set up an operations center to screen Iraqi workers in the heart of the battered capital, triggering massive traffic jams as hundreds of locals queued up for jobs in the post-Saddam Hussein era.

They flocked to a recruitment desk in the Palestine Hotel, where a Marines spokeswoman said they were seeking to put Iraqis back at work in key sectors, starting with the police and electrical power departments.

"We want workers, not only senior officials," said Gunnery Sergeant Claudia Lamantia, of the 1st Marines Expeditionary Force. "The idea obviously is to get everything back working."

Since Wednesday's collapse of Saddam's regime, the Americans have come in for increasing criticism for failing to stem looting and establish security and other basic services in the ravaged country.

Baghdad, a city of five million people, has been without electricity for about 10 days while most homes are also without water and telephone services. Public transportation is non-existent.

But the biggest fear among residents has been the security situation, highlighted by the pillage of entire sections of the city in recent days by rampaging youths from the immense Shiite suburb of Saddam City.

Lamantia, who was getting an earful of complaints from local citizens in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, said the Marines were holding Sunday their first meetings to rebuild the police force and power utility.

"There are fears that this is not happening fast enough," she said. "We are trying to do things one thing at a time."

If more people were on the streets of Baghdad on Sunday, shops remained closed and the sprawling city appeared to teeter between a massive drive for urban renewal or another descent into potential chaos.

US-led forces control most of Iraq, but pockets of resistance remain and the city of Tikrit, Saddam's fiefdom some 150 kilometers (95 miles) north of Baghdad, remains to be captured. Snipers are still a major concern.

An AFP correspondent who reached the centre of the city of 200,000 people on Sunday reported the streets were deserted with no military presence visible.

The correspondent came in from the north, along a road that was open but not secured by US-led coalition forces.

However, a CNN news team had earlier come under fire after going through a checkpoint in Tikrit and then again as they fled, live images showed.

The fall of the city would all but mark the end of the US-led war to topple Saddam launched on March 20, which has seen every other major centre in the country of 26 million people fall into the hands of the US-led coalition.

As a reminder of the work to be done, US marines exchanged heavy fire Saturday with at least two Iraqis who attacked them from the area of Saddam's presidential compound in central Baghdad.

And in a harrowing sign of the warfare possibly to come, US military officials said that US Marines patrolling Baghdad on Friday had discovered 310 vests fitted for use by suicide bombers.

The US Central Command said that 160 of the vests found at an unspecified location contained ball bearings and were "engineered with explosives."

But the US forces were also facing a backlash on another front -- irate Baghdad clerics, residents and businessmen whose shops have been ravaged by looters since the fall of Saddam.

"If they've come to liberate us, then they must help us, and we're not giving them much time," said Sheikh Abdul Razzak al-Lami, who preaches at the al-Rahman mosque in the heart of Saddam City.

SPACE.WIRE