The Hueys and the Apaches wheeled overhead, the patrols fanned out through the town and the armoured cars, spurting plumes of black exhaust, growled along the broad, straight streets. The streets, the best-lit in Iraq, were lined with lamp posts on which hung metal signboards bearing Saddam Hussein's image. At every street corner stood a monumental statue. There was Saddam as Arab warrior on a horse, headdress flying, waving a sabre; Saddam as businessman, neat in his pinstripes and fedora hat; Saddam as technician, earnest in glasses and lab coat. Saddam himself, of course, was nowhere to be seen. Only battalions of the 1st Marine Division. The soldiers had arrived early in the morning, five days after they had rolled into Baghdad and a little over three weeks after they had left Kuwait.

LOST SHEEN: A statue of Saddam is silhouetted against flames in Tikrit

"Jeez," said Specialist Hemming of Delta Company as he looked at the signs, "he was one vain mother." Hemming was one of the first American soldiers into Tikrit, the town 170 km north of Baghdad that everyone had expected would be the site of the last stand of Saddam and his Baa'th party loyalists. "We were psyched for this one," said Hemming. "We thought it was going to be his Waterloo."

Instead, much as elsewhere, there had been no resistance, no Republican Guard armoured divisions, no Special Republican Guards, no mass of fidayeen militiamen. Their armour, unscathed by airstrikes, filled warehouses in camps around the city, but the fighters themselves, and the senior Baa'th figures they were supposed to protect, had melted away. The Marines had only been met by scattered small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, nothing seriously discomforting.

Unlike elsewhere the Baa'th officials had prepared for flight thoroughly, destroying incriminating documents, removing anything of value from the 100 individual villas and palaces built by Saddam for himself or for his closest supporters in the town. The Marines set up headquarters on the grounds of the main palace, a huge pile of brown-stone turrets and domes on the banks of the Tigris. They did not instal themselves inside the building because "it was for the Iraqis". A strict order had gone out against triumphalism. There was not one Stars and Stripes flag anywhere.

The soldiers turned to the journalists for news. "Hey, you know what's going on?" asked one from the turret of his armoured personnel carrier. "Is there anyone left for us to fight?" After Tikrit, everyone knew the answer was "no".

Just outside Tikrit, which has a population of 2,00,000, is Auja, the dictator's birthplace. The Tikritis are known all over Iraq as brawlers and arguers-"talking like a Tikriti" is a well-used phrase-and so many of them formed the central core of the Iraqi regime that the dictator himself had to ban them from using their tribal name, al 'Tikriti, for fear of revealing how locally based his power was.

All through the American and British campaign the battle for Tikrit was spoken of as the final showdown. In the event it was the Kurds from the north who got closest first. Just two days after the fall of the strategic oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 88 km to the northeast of Tikrit, forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) pushed down the roads towards the city. Skirmishes continued as Iraqi army stragglers, Baa'th party loyalists and armed villagers resisted the Kurdish advance. The villagers merely wanted to protect their homes. All of last week bands of armed Kurds roved deep into the heartland of Iraq looking for booty. Dozens of looters and villagers died in the clashes.

Though appreciative of their help, Washington was anxious not to let the Kurdish groups go too far. The PUK had taken Kirkuk far too swiftly than expected by the US State Department and the Pentagon and their rapid advance risked enraging the Turks, who are concerned about the threat posed to their own security. The newly empowered Iraqi Kurds looked set to endanger the fragile political settlement being brokered among Iraq's myriad ethnic groups by the Americans.

Iraq's Sunni Arabs, the group that had benefited most from Saddam's rule, saw the central "triangle" around Tikrit and Baghdad as their territory. In Tikrit too this divide was manifest. Few Sunni Tikritis did manual labour. They employed Kurds from the north, some Shias from the south and even foreign labourers. "The Tikritis looked down on us. We have been liberated," said Farhad Uthman Zangan, a 20-year-old medical assistant, but added, "There will be a big fight now. They hate the US. They call us strangers and robbers and attackers." Local Arabs, even those from tribes that did not support Saddam, were worried about what the American occupation would mean. Adnan Ahmed Ishab, a 29-year-old from the Duleimi tribe, said he had been hoping life would improve. "We are pessimistic," he said. "We had a bad life under the regime and all the oil and the money went to Saddam and his relatives. But we thought the Americans were coming to liberate us, not to occupy us."

Hemming's platoon moved north through the city, taking up positions behind the bombed-out Mukhabarat buildings, the empty palaces and the abandoned villas. When they came across a school they kicked down every door as they searched the building for arms or ammunition. Hundreds of tonnes of weaponry had been found in the Tikrit military hospital the morning before. This school, however, was clean. "Must be the only one we've searched that has nothing in it," Hemming commented wryly. He picked up some chalk and wrote in English on the blackboard: "Sorry about the mess."

Jason Burke is the chief reporter of The Observer, London