Looters strip offices of crumbling Baghdad Government

10.00pm

They paused only to show off their loot to the cameras and shout "Thank you Mr Bush".

Then they rushed back to strip the abandoned ministries of President Saddam Hussein of anything of value. And there wasn't much.

One looter staggered under the weight of an ornamental vase half his height. Another emerged from the Ministry of Irrigation with a huge bouquet of plastic flowers.

The only guns on these streets in central Baghdad on Wednesday were the AK-47s of civilians who broke off looting to denounce Saddam and jump for joy in front of foreign camera crews.

The police and army which have kept Saddam in power for the past 24 years had vanished ahead of a US onslaught.

One man rushing from a government building took of his shoe to hit a poster of Saddam that another looter had removed from an office wall. Someone drew a pair of black horns on another portrait of Saddam.

"If you only knew what this guy did to Iraq! He killed our youth, killed millions of people," said one looter.

"No to Saddam. Thank you Mr Bush," said an old man.

Younger men piled office chairs, tables and boxes into the back of pick-up trucks. Others emerged from a depot rolling yellow tyres.

Crowds later looted government food stores used to dole out state rations and buildings belonging to Saddam's Baath Party.

It was not only the symbols of Saddam's iron rule of Iraq that were ransacked. Iraqis stormed a United Nations compound and drove off in UN marked vehicles and with office equipment.

"It's a shame to see it happening but we're on the ground for military operations, not for policing," said Major Mike Birmingham of the US 3rd Infantry Division.

"It's going to be an issue for the eventual administration to deal with," he said.

Cheering crowds sacked the UN headquarters in the Canal Hotel to the east of the city centre.

Others ransacked sports shops around the bombed Iraqi Olympic Committee building, the effective headquarters of Saddam's elder son, Uday.

The only shooting in the city centre was from Iraqi paramilitaries firing sporadically at US forces across the river.

The firing came from around the Palestine Hotel, home to many foreign journalists, but the US military did not return fire.

"This has been in the air for days. People have just been waiting for a sign that the Americans are in the city," Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis said.

Hundreds of jubilant Iraqis mobbed a convoy of US Marines dancing and waving as American troops swept towards central Baghdad through slums and leafy suburbs from the east.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq war