The US unleashed its full military might against Iraq this evening with waves of air strikes that turned much of Baghdad into an inferno as Washington declared President Saddam Hussein was "finished".
"A few minutes ago the air war in Iraq began," US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said as US bombers rained missiles and bombs on targets in the Iraqi capital, including Saddam's main Republican palace.
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Huge plumes of smoke are seen rising above buildings during air strikes on Baghdad this evening.
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"The regime is starting to lose control of their country," Rumsfeld claimed today, barely 40 hours after the US and Britain launched their war to unseat Saddam and destroy his alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
The US was using "striking force to make clear to Iraqis that he and his regime are finished," he said.
Huge explosions rocked the ancient city of five million people, sending balls of flames and thick clouds of smoke into the sky and setting off shock waves that shook walls and windows.
Defiant in the face of the ferocious onslaught, Iraqi Defence Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed vowed that no force would break Iraq, which came under attack after Saddam spurned a US ultimatum to go into exile.
"No force in the world will conquer us because we are defending our country, our principles and our religion. We are, no doubt, the victors," Mr Ahmed said, his voice sporadically drowned out by violent explosions.
The massive air war followed a ground assault in southern Iraq which saw US and British forces seize a key port and move to the outskirts of Basra, the biggest city in the south and a key prize.
Other Iraqi cities came under air attack late today, with US officials warning that several hundred targets would be hit in the coming hours.
Al Jazeera television said there was a raid on Mosul in the north, and an AFP correspondent said there was also anti-aircraft fire around the key northern oil city of Kirkuk.
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Buildings burn during tonight's heavy bombardement of Baghdad.
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US-led forces were expected to pound Iraqi targets with thousands of guided weapons in a pulverising "Shock and Awe" blitz designed to force the Iraqi regime to surrender.
Until today there had been only limited raids, mainly aimed at Saddam, whose compound was the target of the first air strike before dawn yesterday. Speculation about his fate swirled today, with US media reports suggesting he had been injured.
Nearly 300,000 US and British troops, including 180,000 in Kuwait, have been deployed to fulfil US President George Bush's vow to oust Saddam, who has ruled with an iron fist since 1979.
The US and British forces claimed success in their ground assault after crossing into southern Iraq from Kuwait last night.
British armed forces chief Admiral Sir Michael Boyce said the joint forces had seized the strategic port of Umm Qasr in the south of the country, where fighting was reported, and were poised on the outskirts of Basra.
They ran into pockets of resistance in the race to take control of oilfields and suffered their first casualties when two Marines were killed in action and eight British and four US soldiers died in a helicopter crash in Kuwait.
Sir Boyce also said several hundred Iraqi soldiers had been taken prisoner. Basra, which had been defended by a Republican Guard division, is considered a key prize, vital to Iraq's economy because it controls the country's oil terminals in the Gulf and its only access to the sea.
British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said troops who had secured a beachhead on the strategic Fao Peninsula in southeastern Iraq were working to prevent a massive oil slick in the Gulf after several oil wells had been deliberately set ablaze, creating a dark haze over the Kuwaiti capital.
The ground effort appeared to have three goals: tightening the noose around Saddam, securing Iraq's oil fields before he can burn them and opening routes to deliver relief goods to the country's beleaguered civilians.
Mr Bush said earlier that the war, unleashed after the United States abandoned diplomatic efforts to resolve the Iraqi disarmament crisis, was "making progress."
Agencies