General Franks strides into his Baghdad palace

General Tommy Franks, the US commander of the Iraq invasion force, visited Baghdad yesterday for the first time since the war began.

Dressed in desert fatigues, sleeves rolled up, and with a 9mm Beretta pistol tucked into his belt, General Franks flew to Baghdad airport, where the main runway is so heavily cratered by bomb damage that it is unusable.

After raising his clenched fist in a greeting to waiting US troops, the general's motorcade swept to Abu Ghurayb North Palace, one of Saddam Hussein's many former dwellings. The palace, a sprawling complex complete with extensive gardens and a man-made lake, is now the command centre for American ground forces.

General Franks strode into the marble-clad rooms, hugging and slapping on the back American soldiers who had moved in. The trip was partly a morale-boosting exercise but there had been speculation that General Franks would use the occasion to declare the combat phase of the war over. He refrained from doing that.

"Actually, the President of the United States will determine when the war is over," he said. "I very simply provide the President and the National Security Council with a statement of where we are in the operation. I describe for the President my vision of what I think we'll see in the next week to 10 days."

But he added: "Every day we see remnants of what we call Arab fighters or foreign fighters who have come in from a number of other countries. We see them here in Baghdad and so now we're about the business of rooting them out."

After a meal of troop rations, General Franks toured the palace with his officers, even venturing into a bathroom fitted out with gold fixtures. "It's the oil-for-palace programme," he remarked.

Then, puffing on a cigar, General Franks spoke by telephone to Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and before flying from Baghdad held a video conference with George Bush.

Asked if Iraqis might interpret his presence at Saddam's palace as a sign that one unwanted ruler was being replaced by another, he said that Iraqis recognised that "this has been about liberation, not about occupation".

Separately, Ahmed Chalabi, of the Iraqi National Congress, one of the most prominent groups opposing Saddam Hussein, arrived in Baghdad yesterday for the first time since going into exile after the monarchy was overthrown in 1958.

Mr Chalabi was flown by the US military from northern Iraq to Nasiriyah 10 days ago with 700 of his "Free Iraqi Forces" in a move reflecting his strong support in the Pentagon. Zaab Sethna, one of his lieutenants, said yesterday that he was now ready to set up a headquarters in the centre of the capital.

Mr Chalabi was brought up in a house that is now the Indian embassy in the north Baghdad district of Adhamiya. After leaving Iraq in 1958, he lived abroad, mostly in Lebanon, Jordan, and most recently, in London. Mr Sethna said Mr Chalabi had no immediate plans to reclaim the building, which was appropriated by the government after the 1958 revolution.

About 120 Iraqi exile fighters from Mr Chalabi's group, trained by US special forces and armed with AK-47s, also drove into Baghdad to a low-key welcome. One unit of the Free Iraqi Forces was dressed in US-style military fatigues. "In Baghdad they received a cooler reception than they received in other parts of southern Iraq," a CNN reporter said. "In the southern cities they were cheered, and the [residents] chanted the name of Chalabi."