Troops seize Baghdad airport
Saddam International Airport is about 20km (12 miles) southwest of the centre of the city of five million.
US television network ABC said the airport assault was led by a combination of special operations forces and the 82nd airborne.
ABC reporter Bob Schmidt, with the 3rd Infantry Division, said: “US forces encountered very little Iraqi resistance, although some units of the 3rd Infantry Division did encounter scattered firing by Iraqi foot soldiers and men in pick-ups.”
They were followed by elements of the 3rd Infantry Division and 101st Airborne.
Mr Schmidt said he was standing on the airport tarmac when he filed his report.
CNN reported that civilians living in the area were being ordered by Iraqi authorities to drive to the airport.
The network said all Iraqi checkpoints at the entrances to Baghdad had been closed for the first time.
Sky News correspondent Colin Brazier, also with the 3rd Infantry, said: “Privately the Americans are saying they are in charge.”
He said: “They didn’t think there was a possibility that the airport would simply be surrendered in the way it appears to have been.”
Sources said US forces had discovered some sort of tunnel system under the airport and one tunnel led all the way back to the Tigris river.
Earlier, US commandos raided Saddam’s biggest palace in a resort area north-west of the city.
Infantry troops closed on the Iraqi capital from the south and west after crossing the Euphrates River while Marines advanced on Baghdad from the south-east along the Tigris River.
Large sections of Baghdad lost power for the first time since the war began after huge explosions rocked the capital. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US Central Command had not targeted the city’s power grid.
US troops from the 7th Infantry rolled down a single lane road in punishing heat. They fired at Iraqi troops who tried to ambush the armoured column on both sides.
“They’ve taken several outlying areas and are closer to the centre of the Iraqi capital than many American commuters are from their downtown offices,” US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing.
He said Saddam’s fate was sealed. “For the senior leadership, there is no way out. Their fate has been sealed by their actions,” he said.
Thousands of US military vehicles had pushed across the Euphrates River from the south and west of Baghdad after fighting through a failed Iraqi attempt to hold the bridge at Musayyib, 35 miles due south of the capital.
Elsewhere, at least one US soldier was killed by possible friendly fire, and reporters embedded with troops said two Marines were killed around Kut, one from bullet and shrapnel wounds, the other in a truck accident.
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