Saddam has disappeared, perhaps buried in the rubble of Baghdad, while his troops and Baath party loyalists were killed or captured or simply melted away. The symbols of his 24-year stranglehold on power lay trampled in the streets.

In Tikrit, the much-hyped last stand seemed more like a last falling over.

"We are at a point when the decisive military operations that were focused on removing the regime... (are) coming to a close," said Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, the US Central Command spokesman in Qatar, who has throughout the war refused to claim premature victory.

His British counterpart, Group Captain Al Lockwood, said: "There is a very good chance that once Tikrit has fallen the war will have finished."

It was not the ending promised by Saddam's regime, whose defiant information minister Mohamed Said al-Sahhaf denied there were US troops in Baghdad while live television was beaming images of them rolling through the streets.

Saddam's vast propganda machine kept issuing calls to slay the invaders and launch suicide attacks, and pledges to drive US coalition troops back out of the country, their heads hanging in shame.

Like so many other of Saddam's boasts, it turned out to be empty.

The war began amid dire warnings of brutal street fighting and the ominous threat that Saddam would unleash the genie from the bottle in the form of chemical or biological weapons.

But after a punishing air campaign aimed at Saddam's command and control facilities, US commanders said his field forces in the last hours of battle in Baghdad were desperately trying to send messages by couriers on bicycles.

The rout has been so thorough that in less than a month, Iraqis are already making joint patrols with US forces in Baghdad and British troops in Basra to the south, marking a nation transformed by Western will and massive firepower.

US forces were still encountering some resistance Monday in the city, Saddam's hometown and the one place, if anywhere, that the Iraqi strongman's most dedicated followers could be expected to put up a final, desperate stand.

"There was less resistance than anticipated," Brooks said, adding that the "potential" for combat remained.

"We know there are places where we haven't acounted for all military activity, there are still some places in the country we haven't gone to," he said.

Meanwhile an AFP reporter with US Marines in Baghdad on Monday saw them sunbathing and watching movies, and catching up on news from home with the delivery of the mail.

Now soldiers will focus on what has become a familiar role for Western troops in recent years -- the often difficult task of acting as peacekeepers and trying to help a nation devastated by its third war in as many decades.

The United States is coming under increasing pressure to speed up the reconstruction amid calls to stamp out the lawlessness and looting which has swept the country's cities since Saddam's fall.

It is also organising a meeting of Iraqi opposition groups in the city of Nasiriyah on Tuesday, in an initial step towards what it pledges will be a full handover of power to the Iraqi people.

SPACE.WIRE