Five new explosions have been heard in Baghdad today after a night of bombing knocked out Iraq's national television station.
The station resumed broadcasts this morning following the US and British attack using missiles and air strikes.
"Not long before daybreak, the coalition struck Iraq's main television station, as well as a key telecommunications vault and Baghdad satellite communications, damaging the regime's command and control capability," said one official early today.
Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles and other precision-guided munitions were used in what officials described as an important strike that damaged a "key" part of Iraq's overall command and control operations.
US forces were continuing to assess the damage caused by the raids, which came on the sixth day of the war and paralleled a similar move by a US-led coalition to knock out Iraqi television on the sixth day of the 1991 Gulf War.
Witnesses reported that about 40 large explosions struck the southern outskirts of the Iraqi capital and another hit an area housing the television centre.
Early this morning, Iraq's satellite television was showing either a blank screen but sporadic still pictures suggested technicians were struggling to bring it back. A Reuters Television News camera on the roof of the Information Ministry ceased broadcasting after the raid.
There has been widespread speculation that the United States could use the war in Iraq to introduce high-powered microwave weapons, a new class of weapons that use a burst of electromagnetic energy to disable or destroy the electronics that control everything from an enemy's radar to its laptops.
US defence officials said they had no information that a so-called "E-bomb" had been used in Wednesday's strike.
They said the raid was aimed at eliminating the system Iraqi President Saddam Hussein uses to communicate with the Iraqi people and troops, citing the broadcast this week of gripping images of US prisoners of war and the bloodied corpses of what Iraq said were US troops.
The Iraqi leadership widely uses television to rally people against the invasion and carry news conferences.
Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, made by Raytheon Co., were first used during the 1991 Gulf War. The long-range precision strike weapon is launched from surface ships and submarines, flying at high subsonic speeds at extremely low altitudes.