The last stand is a fantasy, the ugly peace all too real

In the end, Saddam's Last Stand in his home town of Tikrit turned out to be a chimera ­ as wild and fantastic as so many of the illusions on which his regime turned was founded.

On Day 26 of the war, American tanks rumbled into what was said to be the Iraqi regime's last stronghold and found that resistance was as hollow as the legs of one of Saddam Hussein's ubiquitous statues. But elsewhere, Anglo-American forces came up against the realisation that the peace may prove a more difficult struggle than the war.

Long before dawn, the US tanks began to move into the town to which many had predicted President Saddam would flee. It was the place where, during the 1991 Gulf War, he sent his family and many close relatives, back to the bosom of his Albu Nasir tribe. Some 2,500 diehards of the Republican Guard and the Fedayeen were said to be holed up in the city.

But the much-vaunted last stand of the Baathist regime failed to materialise. Coalition forces moved in past abandoned Iraqi tanks, parked in long lines, making them easy targets for the Allied bombardment, which had continued though the night. Everywhere lay military equipment jettisoned in recent days.

One Tikriti resident said of Saddam's troops: "They ran, mostly right at the beginning. And some had already fled two or three days ago. From the beginning we knew it was over and that Saddam had no chance."

Within four hours, American tanks had secured the centre of Tikrit. Sporadic resistance was encountered but led to no serious battle. And yet there was no sign of the jubilation seen when other Iraqi cities fell. A statue of a resplendent Saddam on horseback stood unscathed and pristine pictures of him still adorned lamp-posts. Shops were boarded up.

When the US troops moved into what had been Saddam's most fortified palace they found it deserted. It had been looted even before they got there. They moved through it, and then through the town, house by house, looking for any remnants of the old guard. Some troops seemed quite frustrated. The war had ended not with a battle but with a whimper.

Elements of the Republican Guard had melted away, much as the regular army had in almost every other engagement, with no sign of the Soviet-style defence in-depth that Republican Guard divisions demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf conflict. US sources spoke of some 20 Iraqis killed in the fighting. Talk was heard of a secret deal with Iraqi commanders. A few Fedayeen with little more than machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades were dotted about. But even these had apparently retreated north to an army camp ­ which was then heavily strafed by helicopter gunships.

But, at the biggest palace, American tanks were parked outside the domed gateway and a giant bronze statue of Saddam on horseback with giant rockets at his feet looked only preposterous. The conventional war was over.

Yet still the US military spokesmen were cautious. Tikrit had fallen, and the Americans also finally took the town of Qaim on the Syrian border after fighting for it for two weeks. But the smaller towns and villages ­ bypassed during the rapid advance north ­ remained to be secured.

Of course it was far from over. But all that was left now was the messy part. In the south, it was announced, prisoners of war tried to break out of a detention camp in Umm Qasr, attacking guards with rocks; none escaped, but a number of prisoners were injured as the emergency was brought under control. There were still restrictions on the movement of aid convoys further north than Nasiriyah because the risk of ambush was still high. And US Brigadier General Vincent Brooks announced that up to 80 leather "suicide vests" ­ complete with C4 explosives, ball bearings and detonators ­ were missing from a batch of about 300 found in a Baghdad school last week after forces loyal to Saddam Hussein fled.

In Najaf, the armed mob surrounding the house of the country's leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was disbanded by tribal leaders just hours ahead of the mob's deadline for him to leave the country; the leaders of the siege were reported to be the same group who hacked two prominent clerics to death last week inside the nation's leading Muslim shrine.

Factors were at work in Najaf that hinted at the wider problems Iraq will face in the months and years to come. The mob was led by Muktada al-Sadr, the son of Ayatollah Mohammed al-Sadr, who was murdered by the Iraqi government in 1999. One of the two leading imams murdered at the Shrine of Ali was Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who had recently returned to Iraq from 12 years' exile in London calling for reconciliation. The al-Sadr family has a long-standing rivalry for influence with the al-Khoei clan.

It was but one example of the ancient tribal, ethnic and religious rivalries that Saddam's police state kept in check. Now it is gone old scores are being settled everywhere.

Yesterday in Kirkuk ethnic tensions were growing. Kurds returning to the city were trying to evict Arabs living in homes from which the Kurds had been ejected over the years by Saddam's "Arabisation" programme.

A problem of a different order assumed more menacing proportions. A top Iraqi commander, General Ali al-Jajjawi, the former Republican Guard commander in Mosul, who switched sides during the war, backed Washington's claims that Syria has been giving refuge to members of Saddam's regime. Saddam's Baath party deputy, Izzat Ibrahim, and other top figures had fled to Syria shortly before Mosul fell last Friday, he said. His revelations gave added potency to claims made by President George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, his Defence Secretary. They accused Damascus not only of providing sanctuary to Saddam's cronies but also claimed Syria had chemical weapons.

The attack on Syria appears to have opened a fault-line between America and Britain. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, on a tour of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, sought to play down Syria's new status as an honorary member of the Axis of Evil. "There is much evidence of co-operation between the Syrian government and the Saddam regime in recent months," Mr Straw said. But the country was not "next on the list" of potential US targets, he said, though it clearly had some questions to answer.

The trouble is that the White House will not like the answer it gets. "We say to him," the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Damascus, Buthaina Shaaban, said of Mr Bush, "that Syria has no chemical weapons and that the only chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the region are in Israel, which is threatening its neighbours and occupying their land."

Such a line is provocative considering that most analysts believe the main purpose of the threats against Syria is to put pressure on Damascus to stop aiding militant anti-Israeli groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah. Machiavellian minds see this as the quid pro quo that persuaded Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, to make some conciliatory remarks on the peace process with the Palestinians the previous day.

To stir the pot further, the Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien held a meeting with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian President, in Damascus and officials said afterwards that things had gone well. It may all, of course, be hard cop/soft cop. Or we may be seeing the first sign of division between the Allies' main partners.

Either way the message was being heard in other capitals. North Korea is softening its position, South Korean officials said. And in Tehran the Foreign Ministry announced Iran would deny Iraqi leaders entry; any who entered illegally would be tried for war crimes.

In Baghdad the problems were much more micro. Hospital looting seemed to have abated. Some kiosks and food stores reopened and traffic jams began to clog the streets. But it was clear that only a very small part of this city, perhaps as little as 20 per cent, was firmly under control of the Americans. Journalists going to most parts of the city had to travel in armoured vehicles for fear of being fired upon. The library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment ­ containing priceless Islamic manuscripts ­ also went up in flames.

Some small progress was made. US troops did find an abandoned palace that belonged to Saddam's eldest son, Uday; they found Cuban cigars, liquor, watches and pin-up pictures of cars and women ­ including pictures of Mr Bush's twin daughters. American Marines selected a couple of hundred men from a crowd of 2,000 Iraqi policemen who turned up at the city's police college after a plea for them to help stem looting.

The first contingent of British troops to return home ­ 210 Royal Marines and other troops ­ landed without ceremony at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire as part of what the Ministry of Defence called "the initial stage of a general draw-down of forces in the Gulf".

If the battles are over, the politics is only just beginning. After Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, tried to pour oil on the troubled waters around Syria, the Americans hit back. "Syria is indeed a rogue nation," said the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

Then Mr Rumsfeld said Syria had conducted a chemical weapons test "over the past 12 to 15 months". Reports from inside the White House suggest that "there are some pretty influential voices here in Washington, who may ultimately call for action against Syria".

Saddam's delusions may be over. But the world may yet have cause to fear others from another source.