Not that the nightmare is entirely over. For though the Americans will mark yesterday as their first day of occupation – they, of course, will call it liberation – vast areas of Baghdad remained outside the control of the United States last night. And at dusk, just before darkness curled over the land, I crossed through the American lines, back to the little bit of Saddam's regime that remained intact within the vast, flat city of Baghdad. Down grey, carless streets, I drove to the great bridges over the Tigris which the Americans had still not crossed from the west. And there, on the corner of Bab al-Moazzam Street, were a small group of mujahedin fighters, firing Kalashnikov rifles at the American tanks on the other side of the waterway. It was brave and utterly pathetic and painfully instructive.

For the men turned out to be Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Not an Iraqi was among them. The Baathist militiamen, the Republican Guard, the greasy Iraqi intelligence men, the so-called Saddam Fedayeen had all left their posts and crept home. Only the foreign Arabs, like the Frenchmen of the Nazi Charlemagne Division in 1945 Berlin, fought on. At the end, many Iraqis had shunned these men and a group of them had turned up to sit outside the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, pleading to journalists for help in returning home.

"We left our wives and children and came here to die for these people and then they told us to go," one of them said. But at the end of the Bab al-Moazzam Bridge they fought on last night and when I left them I could hear the American jets flying in from the west. Hurtling back through those empty streets, I could hear, too, the American tank fire as it smashed into their building.