“YANKEE bastard,” yelled the young British peacenik at the first American tank to roll up to the Palestine Hotel. “Go home.”

She picked a man who had waited for 576 days to give his answer. Marine First Lieutenant Tim McLaughlin leant from the turret of his Abrams tank — nickamed “Satan’s Right Hand” — and screamed back: “I was at the Pentagon September 11. My co-workers died. I don’t give a f***.”

Lieutenant McLaughlin had with him a Stars and Stripes that he had been given at the Pentagon that fateful day. In Baghdad’s Paradise Square, he handed the flag to Corporal Edward Chin, who climbed a giant statue of Saddam and draped it over the deposed dictator’s head.

It was there only briefly; the gesture raised hardly a cheer from the gathering crowd and a black, white and red Iraqi flag quickly replaced it as a scarf around the statue’s neck. That, too, was removed to make way for the winch that would bring down the hated figure.

Lieutenant McLaughlin’s battalion was in the vanguard yesterday when the US 1st Marine Division rolled up to the east bank of the Tigris in central Baghdad, marking the moment when Saddam’s regime effectively came to an end.

It was a momentous day, reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the communist empire in 1989. And no image of it will be more enduring than the toppling of that 20ft Saddam statue by a US tank egged on by a cheering, excited mob which then stamped with undisguised glee on the fallen idol.

Seldom in history has a city almost the size of London fallen. As resistance in Saddam’s capital crumbled, and the leaders of a collapsing regime folded their tents and crept away, the US Defence Secretary condemned Saddam to a place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin and Ceausescu “in the pantheon of failed, brutal dictators”.

Celebrating local people said the regime’s enforcers — the militias, security apparatus and Baath party loyalists — had quietly melted away. A city that went to sleep under a tottering regime awoke in a power vacuum.

And the people knew it. No one lives under the arbitrary imposition of power for four decades without developing acutely honed antennae for authority, and when it disappears the oppressed need no news bulletin or headline to tell them. The absence of burning oil fires, of checkpoints, of Republican Guard; the field artillery pieces abandoned under flyovers, the empty sandbag positions all told the tale.

Within hours Saddam City, a poor suburb heavily populated by Iraq’s downtrodden Shia majority, had exploded into a festival of looting.

As our car sped east to document the ransacking, delighted Shias waved joyously as they walked, drove and rode in the opposite direction, their vehicles loaded with microwaves, rifles, calculators, car batteries, food, oil and cigarettes. Suddenly shoulders were things to carry booty on, not to look over.

Yesterday The Times saw looting by car, looting by ponytrap, looting by bicycle, looting by makeshift sled. One man even pressed an office swivel chair into service to haul away a television. Another youth liberated the barrel of a heavy machinegun from a local police station without even knowing what it was. “I want it for my home,” he said, proudly.

The looting was accompanied by the first expression of political opposition in Baghdad for decades. The Baath party headquarters of Saddam City — a prime candidate for the likely rash of renamings over the coming days — had been ransacked and other buildings torched. Posters of Saddam were torn or defaced, one with the name of the Prophet’s son-in-law Imam Ali, a symbolic leader for the country’s Shia majority.

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