Stories of the Fall

All From the UK Independent

I Think Fisk Seems Bitter and Cynical

Fresh troops to target Saddam's home town

Eleven Afghan civilians killed by off-target US bomb

Euphoria, Little Gunfire

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.