US soldiers moved into the city centre and were met with smiles not gunfire

Finally it came, the day when Iraqis danced in the street. But as darkness had fallen the night before, few would have dared predict that Day 21 of the Allied invasion would prove the day that occupation turned into liberation.

When the sounds of fighting faded on Day 20, Baghdad was a divided city. The River Tigris, which runs through the Iraqi capital from north to south, had become a meandering line of separation between Iraqi and American territory.

To the west of the 11 bridges across the river lay the large US-controlled enclave, which had been extended though the day so that almost an entire armoured brigade – several thousand troops – were now in the heart of the Baghdad seat of government.

To the east lay the commercial centre of Baghdad, the old part of the city and the greatest areas of population.

Between the two, soldiers and Fedayeen loyal to the Saddam regime had put up fierce resistance along the river bank all day. The opposition seemed poorly organised. But the Fedayeen, though lightly armed, seemed dedicated and unyielding. US military spokesmen were predicting tough days of fighting ahead as they continued to penetrate and probe the defences of the capital.

It was a quiet night. Unusually so, because bombs had fallen with increasing ferocity on the city throughout the previous two weeks. But last night residents reported very few aircraft and relatively few explosions. "It's been one of the quietest nights in the whole of this war," reported the BBC's Rageh Omaar as dawn broke. "It's eerily quiet here, it's a bizarre sort of atmosphere, as if the whole city is in some sort of strange limbo waiting to see what the Americans do next."

What they were doing next was moving thousands of US troops towards the centre from the west, northeast and south. And they were meeting little resistance.

The first clue of the momentous events that were about to unfold came just after dawn as US marines moved into the sprawling suburb of Saddam City – a poor area occupied chiefly by Shia Muslims, the majority community in Iraq that was oppressed by Saddam Hussein and his Sunni-dominated clique. As they fanned out through the Shia stronghold the Americans were greeted by smiling Iraqis. Not a shot was fired. Messages of support for the invading force were even broadcast from mosques. It was the sign of things to come.

Then, at 6.52am, foreign journalists at the Palestine Hotel realised that the Iraqi government minders, who had been monitoring their every move, had not turned up for work. They could move freely move around the city for the first time since the start of the war.

Nor was there any sign of the Baath regime's sinisterly comic Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. The day before he had stood within earshot of American guns and pronounced that the infidel invaders would "surrender or be burned in their tanks". But the man who began his press conferences in a large hall, then moved to a small one, then to the roof of the press hotel, and finally to its car-park, yesterday failed to turn up at all.

Perhaps just as significantly, the Iraqi police force seem to have completely disappeared. One reporter recalled a conversation overheard earlier between his minder and a police officer who asked when he should run away. "Not yet," the minder had told him. By yesterday clearly the policeman had finally decided the time to run had come. Other members of the regime were seen quietly shredding their government identity cards.

Unchecked, the ordinary people poured into Baghdad's dusty streets. Crowds celebrated, giving flowers to the troops, shaking their hands, even kissing them. The troops responded with blank stoic suspicion. In the Shia areas men beat their breasts – a characteristic expression of religious piety that was outlawed under Saddam to the point where people were shot dead in the street for doing it.

Everywhere jubilant people were waving flags, clapping, sounding car horns and chanting anti-Saddam Hussein slogans – "Saddam is God's enemy" – and pro-American ones – "Good, good Bush" and "Thank you Meester Bush". It was the outcome the US President and his war-planners had initially predicted, and later crossed their fingers would eventually come.

Some sought out images of Saddam Hussein – so ubiquitous they did not have to search far – and began to abuse and deface them. An old man in Saddam City was seen hitting a picture of Saddam Hussein with his shoe, a great insult in the Arab world. Just yesterday it would have brought a sentence of death. Today it was a symbol of an internalised fear being purged.

At the US Central Command in Qatar, officials from the US and British military watched all this unfold on 24-hour TV news channels. They were cautious in their response. It was too early to say that the Iraqi regime has crumbled, said the senior British military spokesman, Group Captain Al Lockwood, just before 9am.

They evidently did not hear him in Iraq. Across the country the news was spreading that Saddam Hussein was dead (rightly or wrongly) and the regime was vanquished. In the Kurdish-held town of Arbil in northern Iraq there were scenes of ecstatic jubilation in the streets. It was the same in towns throughout the country, to which news of the scenes in Baghdad spread swiftly. There were celebrations in Basra and Karabla where a large portrait of Saddam Hussein was adorned with a devil's horns.

By mid-morning in London, a spokesman for the Prime Minister felt sufficiently confident to venture that "the command and control in Baghdad appears to have disintegrated". But he said the Allies could still face "fierce" resistance.

Indeed the fighting was not completely over. As the crowds cheered, the intermittent sound of artillery could be heard. US troops entering Baghdad from the north-west met resistance from Iraqi forces, and there were other isolated pockets of fighting elsewhere.

Journalists who ventured out of their hotel reported that the opposition came from irregular forces – Baath party militiamen and Saddam Fedayeen – wearing jeans and T-shirts and armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles. For all that they were, said one, "true believers, the party faithful" who feel their fate is personally linked to that of Saddam. Many of them, suggested the BBC's correspondent Paul Wood, were probably acting on orders sent out by Saddam Hussein before air strikes began, "thinking his command and control and his communications would be destroyed – and there may be some organised units out there who like the Japanese after the Second World War don't yet know exactly what is happening".

Certainly things were dangerous enough for the Red Cross – which lost a member of staff in the city the day before after his car was hit by gunfire – to suspend operations.

Violence of a different kind threatened as the liberated Iraqis decided that this was an opportunity for them to do some liberating themselves. Widescale looting began of government buildings, research institutes and the headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic Committee which was run by Saddam's son Uday. At first it was good-natured. Men, women and children ran laughing through the streets, carrying office chairs, sacks of grain and other supplies on their backs. A crowd ransacking a government intelligence headquarters came out with not just furniture but bottles of Chivas Regal and other fine blends normally unseen in Baghdad.

At first the military authorities were relaxed. "Anarchic scenes of looting in the capital were to be expected," said the US Armed Forces chief spokesman, General Vincent Brooks. "Some of this occurs because of a vacuum between the departure, or the perception of the departure, of the regime and the establishment of conditions of normalcy. This is a lot of pent up anger which has been a part of these peoples lives for their entire lives."

But the precedent of Basra, liberated two days earlier, was not encouraging. Yesterday looting was continuing on a large scale, with reports of fridges, ceiling fans, fire engines, pieces of corrugated iron and even a grand piano being wheeled along the streets. British soldiers foiled a raid on a bank vault. And one looter was stoned to death after an angry mob rounded on four men caught stealing from shops.

In Baghdad too things turned ugly. One man turned a heavy calibre machine gun, evidently wrenched from an armoured vehicle, on a crowd of looters in what appeared to be a fight between rival gangs. There was at least one corpse on the ground.

Tensions were high in the Sunni areas of the city, through which troops had earlier had to fight their way through sporadic resistance. Some of the sporadic machine gun fire there was thought to be shopkeepers trying to defend their property from looters. Shops had been shuttered and the windows bricked up for some time. In a city of five million people the divide between Sunni and Shia is also one between rich and poor. The fear that looting could tip into widespread disorder, and even take on the character of a small civil war, is real.

But yesterday was not a time for future fears. It was a day of euphoria which reached its climax in Paradise Square in the centre of Baghdad. It was a scene familiar to millions of TV viewers worldwide – for it was from here that the international media corps had covered the Iraqi end of the war. Its huge traffic island, with a blue-domed mosque and minaret to one side and a massive statue of the lordly Saddam in its centre, had been the backdrop to three weeks of 24 hour news pictures of not much happening in the centre of the Iraqi capital.

At 1.31pm yesterday something enormously dramatic finally happened. Two columns of US tanks arrived. The Marines, coming from the east, met the 3rd Infantry Division, arriving from the west. The pincer movement was complete. The symbolic fall of Baghdad happened, as almost everything else has seemed to in this war, on live television.

At first it was a moment of calm anti-climax, as the troops greeted one another and the TV and press cameramen who spilled from the Palestine Hotel from which the war had been covered. Then, gradually, the plain people of Iraq began to merge, but thronging the square rather aimlessly it seemed.

Then someone found a focus. An Iraqi man climbed the massive statue with a rope and the symbolic toppling of the giant bronze statue of the hated Iraqi leader. In the end, fittingly enough, the locals could not manage on their own and had to enlist the support of an American armoured tractor. In another revealing slip the US troops threw a Stars and Stripes over Saddam Hussein's head before someone from Central command crackled onto their radio and told them to replace it with an Iraqi one. Someone produced an old pre-Saddam version of the national flag.

Nearly an hour and a half later, at 3.49pm, the statue fell, slumping at first like an incapable drunk, but then crashing to the ground. The citizens jumped on it, like Lilliputians on Gulliver, and screamed and danced in sheer exultation. The regime was dead.

"The thirst for freedom is unquenchable," announced President Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, on TV. Not long afterwards Iraq's ambassador to the UN, Mohammed al-Douri said, in New York, he had had no contact with his government for some time. "I watch the tv like you," he said. It has been, truly, a television war.

But if the regime is dead, what of Saddam Hussein himself? The day had been battered with contradictory reports from all quarters. US sources said he had been killed on Monday in the attack on the restaurant, where he had been meeting with 30 top officials in a bunker under the building; he had been seen entering and did not emerge before four satellite-guided US bombs destroyed it. But Britain's intelligence agency, MI6, insisted the Iraqi leader left the building moments before the strike. The CIA believes he was killed. Iran says eyewitnesses report Saddam did indeed leave. To cap the uncertainty Haitham Rashid Wihaib, an Iraqi defector who was for many years Saddam Hussein's chief of protocol, said the Iraqi leader left Baghdad the moment he felt the American and British troops were approaching. "He left for Tikrit."

Saddam Hussein's hometown lies 112 miles north of Baghdad. It is still heavily fortified. But that is a battle for another day. On Day 21 of the war in Iraq a psychological and emotional line was crossed. The death grip that Saddam Hussein had on his country for 25 years was finally broken.

Invasion of iraq day's events

* WEDNESDAY 0330 BST: Sound of gunfire is heard shortly after daybreak in Baghdad.

0652: BBC correspondents in Baghdad say their activities are no longer being monitored by Iraqi minders.

0820: Looting breaks out, with no sign of uniformed Iraqi soldiers or police.

1019: "The command and control in Baghdad appears to have disintegrated," Tony Blair's spokesman says.

1300: Iraqi civilians attack a giant statue of Saddam Hussein in al-Fardus (Paradise) Square, central Baghdad.

1452: An American armoured personnel carrier pulls down the statue, to the cheers of jubilant Iraqis.

1551: Commander of the US 3rd Infantry Division, General Buford Blount, tells Reuters the heart of Baghdad has been secured and the "end of the combat phase is days away".

Words of war

US Marine Corporal Matt Jamiolkowski:

"I can't believe we're sitting in Baghdad right now. This is supposed to be the Super Bowl isn't it? Where's the other team? I guess they didn't want to show."

Tony Blair:

"We have seen today the scales of fear falling from the people of Iraq."

Yusuf Abed Kazim, a Baghdad imam who pounded the pedestal of Saddam Hussein's statue with a sledgehammer:

"I'm 49, but I never lived a single day. Only now will I start living. That Saddam Hussein is a murderer and a criminal."

Mohammed al-Shahhal, a 49-year-old teacher in Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli:

"Those who applauded the collapse of Lenin's statue for some Pepsi and hamburgers felt the hunger later on and regretted what they did."