What was left of Saddam Hussein's rule crumbled across northern Iraq yesterday. Lynne O'Donnell, in Bardarash, watched it happen. "We are under orders from our leadership not to move forward until we have been told to by the coalition forces," said Salim Ibrahim, Kurdish commander of the 79th Peshmerga Bardina Forces. And so he waited for his orders.
"We are under orders from our leadership not to move forward until we have been told to by the coalition forces," said Salim Ibrahim, Kurdish commander of the 79th Peshmerga Bardina Forces. And so he waited for his orders.
"We don't know if we will have to fight, but there are definitely still Iraqi troops inside Mosul."
Militiamen, known in Kurdish as peshmerga or "those who are prepared to die", sat on a hilltop outside the nearby Sirkani village watching a B-52 bomber circle above Mosul. Smoke from fires caused by a day of bombing raids could be seen on the horizon.
Hawara Mohammed Amin, an officer with the special forces of the Kurdish Democratic Party, estimated that at least 10 bombs had been dropped on the city since dawn. He said that Iraqi forces had quit Sirkani four days previously during heavy artillery shelling which had pockmarked the hillsides.
Evidence of the resistance offered by the Saddamite troops could be seen on the tarmac road between Shew Ree and Sirkani. The burnt-out shells of three Iraqi trucks lay beside the road and helmets left behind by retreating troops were on the grass.
Any fight left in those loyal to Saddam is fast dissolving as word trickles through to residents in the city that his soldiers are on the run and that the coalition forces are close to full control of Baghdad.
The head of the KDP's 9th Branch, Omar Osman, who arrived at Shew Ree in a small convoy, said there were now no regime forces on the road to Mosul. He cited telephone conversations with residents who had told him that they were preparing to rise up against the regime.
As he spoke, a red Toyota sedan crawled along the road from Mosul, the first car to come from the sealed city in four days. Of the two men in the car, one was a major with Saddam Hussein's army who told the peshmerga that he wished to surrender.
Mosul, which has a population of 1.2 million, is one of the most important cities in Iraq. Despite sitting on vast oil resources, petroleum does not dominate Mosul. Rather, it is a major centre of the military industry, with garrisons, arsenals and armaments factories.
Coalition bombers, which for 12 years have patrolled northern Iraq to keep it a safe haven for the minority Kurds against the persecution of Saddam Hussein's regime, last week destroyed one of Mosul's main arsenals.
Two of Saddam's armies, the 3rd and 4th, have been massing in Mosul for the past month, with at least two soldiers said to have entered each house to ensure that residents did not rise up once Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched.
But the scenes in Kirkuk, which fell without a fight early yesterday, suggest that the hermetic seals on information are rapidly breaking down, and Mr Osman said he expected Mosul residents to turn on their Baathist oppressors as soon as they were confident that the regime was no longer in control.
Kirkuk residents danced in the streets and destroyed a huge statue of Saddam Hussein after Iraqi regulars, some of them dressed in civilian clothing, threw down their Kalashnikovs and crawled out of their foxholes to be greeted as brother Iraqis.
On the Square of Arabian Nights, crowds gathered around the base of a giant bronze statue of Saddam, wrapping steel cables around its neck and attaching them to a truck which pulled it to the ground in a scene similar to that in Baghdad a day earlier.
As the statue fell forward in a humiliating symbol of the end of the dictator's rule, thousands of people thronged forward, throwing stones, spitting and even firing a rocket at the monument to Saddam's vanity.
"What is happening here today is not very nice, but you must understand my countrymen," said Khalid Ismail (40), a supermarket owner. "They have just awoken from a nightmare of 35 years of terror."
Crowds could be seen rushing into public buildings and carrying away what they could. "We are not looting. Saddam took everything from us, now we are taking back what is ours," Alum Wali said.
The KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two main Kurdish organisations in control of the north, appeared ready to step into the vacuum left by the departing Baathists, a move expected to rapidly restore confidence and calm.
The final straw for the Baathist rulers of Kirkuk came when residents learned that Kurdish fighters, led by US special forces, were on their way into the city. "The death squads had already left yesterday. They knew more about what had happened in Baghdad than us," said Khabat Dolat, a resident of the city.
The surrendering soldiers, many barefoot and carrying their black leather army boots in their hands, were greeted with hugs and gifts as they ran across a bridge into the hamlet of Altin Kopru and told of how their senior officers had left them behind as they abandoned their posts shortly after dawn.
"The officers left about 200 of us behind, so we sat and waited for the peshmerga to come and get us," said 23-year-old Ayad Jaz, a conscript from Nassiriya who had spent two months on the northern front.
Explaining why he was dressed in an orange tracksuit instead of military fatigues, he said: "We were not allowed to wear uniforms so that we would appear to be civilians. Our lieutenant told us to wear ordinary clothing and took our uniforms away."
Many said that they knew nothing of the events which had brought jubilation to the people of northern Iraq, who for 12 years have faced down the troops of the Baathist regime across a no-man's-land now carpeted with wild red poppies and yellow daisies. "Saddam Hussein is not the president of Iraq?" said Emir Raji. "We had our radios confiscated weeks ago. I surrendered. I am sick of fighting."