Throughout their 15-day, 350-mile campaign from Kuwait across the Iraqi desert, they had seen the airport on their secret maps under the codename "Objective Lions."

It was the ultimate objective for the 1st Brigade of the Third Infantry Division.

Now, they control most of the sprawling complex and have renamed it simply Baghdad International Airport, dropping the name of President Saddam Hussein, the man they are in Iraq to overthrow.

"This is the prize. They're just kind of absorbing that right now," while awaiting new orders, according to Major Mark Nordstrom, the brigade's chaplain.

He said the troops could see "the light at the end of the tunnel" and start considering plans for returning home.

US forces were busy starting to salvage the bomb-cratered runway for use by coalition aircraft, destroying nearby Iraqi anti-aircraft defenses and hunting for weapons caches while still fighting off "probing" attacks by pockets of Iraqi troops.

A US officer said that airport buildings were still being searched and underground tunnel complexes were also suspected to exist.

The strategic prize gives US forces a chance to form a massive logistics base 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Baghdad as well as launch more powerful military strikes aimed at toppling Saddam's regime.

In a cavernous hangar bay, US troops clutching rifles watched over eight Iraqi prisoners of war they had surrounded with a roll of barbed wire. Seven of them, some wearing checkered headscarves, sat by the hangar's rear wall while the eighth was about to be questioned by a US soldier.

Outside a neighboring hangar, a command post was set up by interlocking armored vehicles and tents, while inside the facility journalists found desks and chairs to work on.

The glass doors of the offices in the hangar had been smashed. Portraits of Saddam Hussein decorated their walls.

In the open air, M1-A1 Abrams battle tanks, armored Bradley fighting vehicles and the Paladin, a 155-mm self-propelled gun that resembles a giant tank, all took up neat formations.

Several hundred meters (yards) away, the marines swept through a bunker complex, detonating Iraqi munitions which produced orange flames and sent thick black smoke billowing into the sky.

In an adjacent area, just off the runway, lay the charred remains of an Iraqi airliner, with only its tail fin identifiable, an apparent victim of a US air strike earlier in the war.

Even the two sides traded fire at another corner of the compound, Sergeant Jennifer Reichle, a smiling 24-year-old US army intelligence specialist, could hardly contain her glee.

"We hardly took any losses. It looks like we're going to leave with most everyone we came with -- with their fingers and toes," said Reichle, one of the brigade's few female soldiers.

"I feel like we won already. I don't know if it's too early or not," she added.

Private First Class Steven Jones interjected however, saying: "It's not over yet."

For Jones, it will be over when US forces find Saddam Hussein.

Other soldiers still feared street battles for Baghdad, though most appeared to breathe a sigh of relief that the war appeared to be coming to an end.

The commander of the Third Infantry Division, General Buford Blount, estimated that more than 4,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict, as against only seven combat deaths in his division and a few others among other units.

But as US commanders like Major Morris Goins, the brigade's operations officer, and others put it: "We're not out of bad-guy country yet."

That was shortly after dawn, when the airport exploded in a cacophony of deep-throated bursts of heavy machine gun fire, the thud, whoosh and ping of artillery and rocket fire and the Gatling guns of the A-10 tank-killing airplanes, dubbed "warthogs".

It subsided later, though the occasional mortar exploded inside the complex, startling some.

The Friday action followed a night in which commanders said they were surprised at how little resistance there had been tanks smashed through a perimeter wall around 7:30 pm.

Only small arms fire was reported.

After an AFP reporter arrived here shortly around midnight, US aircraft dropped precision-guided bombs on air defense and other sites, causing the ground to shudder and orange flashes to erupt.

WAR.WIRE