Millions of people in cities across the globe took to the streets today in protest against any US-led war on Iraq after Washington said a decision was only "weeks" away.
Rallies fired up in cities across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, in what organisers claim is the biggest day of pacifist protest in history, bolstered by politicians and celebrities.
More than one million people marched through London, making it the Britain's largest ever peace demonstration, organisers claimed.
Hundreds of thousands of campaigners crammed into Hyde Park for a mass rally to voice opposition to a conflict with Iraq.
An estimated two million took part in a massive anti-war demonstration in Rome. The huge turnout is a major rebuke of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's backing for Washington's hardline stance on Iraq, which has been controversially extended to allow the US army to use Italy's roads, railways and ports in the build-up to a conflict.
Demonstrators in Paris, led by more than 80 political parties, unions and organisations, were joined by American pacifists protesting the US policy towards Iraq.
"American citizens against the US government's war-mongering and unilateral foreign policy," read one banner.
"Down with imperialist war," chanted demonstrators in Athens.
"Bush: hands of Iraq," read one banner in Moscow, while in the streets of Islamabad, protestors set US flags ablaze.
New York was to be the focus of the main US demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands expected at a rally near UN headquarters. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people massed in Berlin for the biggest peace rally there since the 1980s, when the United States deployed missiles in Germany aimed at the then Soviet Union.
Large-scale anti-war protests went ahead across the Middle East, including in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian territories and Israel.
Some 200,000 Syrians demontrated in Damascus, with one banner reading: "Axis of Evil: America, Britain, Israel".
In Iraq itself, two massive anti-war rallies filled the streets of Baghdad, with many protestors carrying guns. Official figures put the number of protestors at one million. Reporters estimated the turnout at several hundred thousand.
AFP