Forward march: the Allied military machine rolls on towards Saddam

They were the first confirmed casualties of the second Gulf War. Three soldiers, probably conscripts, driving in an Iraqi army lorry inside an almost deserted army compound on the border with Kuwait. They were killed by tank shells as 20,000 American soldiers poured through holes in the fence on Thursday night.

The Americans carefully placed the victims in black bags, laid them by the side of the road and gathered their belongings so they could be forwarded to their families.

The first accident of the war was at 12.37am GMT, when a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter, flying in poor visibility caused by the billowing smoke from the burning oil wells, nosedived to the ground, killing eight British servicemen and four Americans as it exploded on impact inside Kuwait, nine miles from the Iraqi border. Their comrades in other helicopters thought it was an oil fire.

Within hours, the ground war, which began in the barren Iraqi desert before stretching 100 miles inside Iraq, claimed its first Allied combat casualties too. At 3am, the first American soldier to die in combat, a member of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, was gunned down by Iraqi artillery as US troops advanced on the Rumeila oilfield in the southern Al-Faw peninsula. Another US Marine was to die eight hours later inside Iraq. President Bush was informed of the first soldier's death in the early hours of yesterday and expressed his regrets.

Seven of the Rumeila wells were set on fire, sending swirls of thick black smoke across the southern region, as the Iraqis put up a sturdy defence. In the fog of war, Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, had said earlier that as many as 30 wells were alight.

Two hours after the Allied helicopter crash, the Ministry of Defence broke the news. Downing Street had already been informed. By early morning, the message was relayed to Brussels, where the Prime Minister's team was preparing for a press conference. By then, the ministry had confirmed the crash was an accident, rather than the result of enemy fire. That had a crucial bearing on the content of the Government's remarks.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, paid tribute to "our very brave young men and women" on Radio 4's Today programme. Mr Blair, speaking to reporters at the end of yet another divisive European summit just before midday, expressed his condolences. "These were brave men who, in order to make us safer and more secure, knew the risks, faced the risks and had the courage to serve their country and the wider world," he said. Only minutes earlier, in London, the Labour MP Glenda Jackson angered colleagues by saying the British servicemen had died "needlessly."

In the summit press room in Brussels, Downing Street was again playing hardball, telling journalists that six countries that had passed condolences to Mr Blair. France was notably absent from the list.

But inside the meeting room, the glacial atmosphere was melting. Jacques Chirac, the French President, the leader of the anti-war front, sent Mr Blair a handwritten note expressing his sorrow, a gesture that may have had an important effect on their personal relations.

When a tired-looking Prime Minister spoke to a packed press conference, he said: "France has expressed its condolences to us. Indeed, President Chirac wrote me a personal note about it."

Meanwhile, the ground war grew in earnest, with the Allies attempting to secure the strategic oilfields as they raced towards Basra, Iraq's second city. Memories of Saddam Hussein's retreating troops setting fire to the Kuwaiti oilfields as a final act of revenge at the end of the 1991 Gulf War were a powerful incentive.

At 7.55am, Mr Hoon announced that the Al-Faw peninsula had been secured but admitted that US and British troops were facing fierce resistance, despite a day of pummelling Iraq's forces with cruise missiles and bombs.

The resistance proved short-lived, however, as the demoralised regular army troops rapidly surrendered to the coalition. By the end of yesterday, the commander of Iraq's 51st division in southern Iraq and his top deputy had surrendered to the US Marines. Advancing on several flanks, British forces entering from the east headed for Basra, while the US Army's 3rd Infantry division and the 1st Marines were rolling towards Baghdad.

At 10am, B-52 bombers began taking off from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. The long wait was over. Within 30 minutes, eight of the 14 bombers had begun their journey, while six remained on the ground. Peace protesters who had gathered at the base looked on angrily.

At 10.05am, a British military spokesman in Qatar told reporters that coalition troops may be in Baghdad "within three or four days".

On the western front, from where it was feared the Iraqis could attack Israeli targets with Scud missiles, US troops secured the main airfields in the region and dropped cluster bomblets – the same weapon controversially used in Afghanistan and blamed for the deaths of civilians who confused the unexploded bomblets with food packages. The Iraqi airfields in the western desert, known as H-2 and H-3, were taken without much resistance from Iraqi troops, though Allied control appeared tentative.

The H-3 airfield, 240 miles from Baghdad, has been one of Iraq's primary air-defence installations. Allied pilots bombed it in September. The destruction of the airfield's radar would open up a clear route from the west to allow US and British warplanes to mount raids on Iraq.

At 2.53pm, a British-led force of up to 15,000 men captured the new port of Umm Qasr, and most of the city after a night of heavy shelling by Allied forces. The capture of Iraq's only deep-water port is crucial for the channelling of humanitarian aid and supplies into the country.

One of the first acts of the US Marines who took the city with the support of British forces was to take down the Iraqi flag over the new port area and replace it with the Stars and Stripes. A few hours later, the US flag had been removed.

As many as 200 Iraqi prisoners were taken. They appeared to be draftees who were in very poor condition rather than the crack Republican Guard. A US military official said: "I kind of felt sorry for them. A lot of them looked hungry. They haven't been fed in a while." The Iraqis had been fighting with small arms, pistols, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

The British troops had advanced on the strategic port city at the southern end of the Al-Faw peninsula at daybreak, the landscape still littered with burnt-out debris dating from the end of the first Gulf War. Despite the fears of a gas attack from the Iraqi defenders, some British soldiers wore their gas masks slung in containers on their hips.

While US Marines headed over the border, teams of Royal Marines and Navy Seals staged helicopter raids on two oil terminals in the Gulf, Kaabot and Mabot, seizing both, and taking 15 prisoners.

Shortly afterwards, other Seals and British troops staged an air assault, backed by artillery based in Kuwait and ship-based missiles on other oil-related targets at the tip of the peninsula. As the battle raged, Mr Hoon predicted at 11am that the port would be taken "shortly".

Speaking at his Brussels press conference shortly afterwards, Mr Blair admitted, however: "I should warn that our forces will face resistance and that the campaign, necessarily, will not achieve all its objectives overnight."

Harrier pilots who returned to their bases in Kuwait safely described their first sorties.

US Air Force Captain Red Walker, flying a Harrier as an exchange pilot, was targeted by a surface-to-air missile. "I was still inside Kuwait and suddenly I saw this huge firework and I thought 'Holy shit, that is coming for me.' I veered down and right and dodged it. I feel really lucky tonight." As US armoured columns raced towards Baghdad, one unit ran into Iraqi resistance that halted it near Nassiriya on the Euphrates river, 235 miles south-east of Baghdad.

And there were still problems on the northern front. Although the Turkish parliament held a long-awaited vote on Thursday, granting permission for US warplanes to cross Turkish territory for operations in northern Iraq, the terms were still under discussion with the Americans yesterday.

The northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk were pounded by Allied air strikes, as the Americans moved on the oil centre of Kirkuk to protect Iraq's resources from sabotage and return crude exports to world markets. Kurdish military commanders said US Special Forces were seeking to cut off Kirkuk and Mosul from the south, but they could not confirm reports that the US had seized the Kirkuk oilfields.

At 3.15pm, the White House warned that expectations of a short, sharp war should not be exaggerated. "I think it's important for the American people to remember this still can be a long, lengthy, dangerous engagement," the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said. "This is, as the President said, the opening phase ... No matter what people perceive, this is real, this is war, this is dangerous, there are many risks ahead," he added.

As dawn broke in Baghdad, the ruins of the presidential compound occupied by President Saddam Hussein's younger son and heir apparent, Qusay, were still smouldering from the cruise missile barrage of Thursday night. It was not clear whether Qusay was inside the building. Several government departments at the centre of his regime have their headquarters on the grounds of the complex, including the Planning Ministry, which broke into flames.

President Bush was meanwhile branded as the "leader of the international criminal gang of bastards" by an Iraqi spokesman, and the Iraqi leadership continued to predict that the Allied invaders would meet their deaths in Iraq. "We will not let them leave the swamp they have entered. They will meet their fate," crowed the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf.

At 10.23am, Mr Sahhaf acknowledged for the first time that Saddam Hussein's house, built over an underground bunker in southern Baghdad, had been the target of Wednesday night's surprise air raids just after the expiry of the ultimatum for Saddam to leave the country or be toppled.

"Victory is guaranteed," said the Interior Minister, Mahmoud Diyab al-Ahmed, defiantly waving a shiny Kalashnikov and standing in front of a picture of President Saddam and the Iraqi flag. He ridiculed suggestions that Umm Qasr would fall to the Allies as "silly talk".

The CIA reluctantly conceded that the man who had appeared on Iraqi television hours after the first attack, exhorting Iraqis to take up arms, was indeed the Iraqi President. But Mr Fleischer continued to insist that "there is no conclusive evidence about whether that was taped before or after the operation began".

Some American and British officials were still maintaining that President Saddam may have been wounded in the attack, or even killed.

The mystery deepened as intelligence agencies monitoring Iraqi communications detected a significant drop in intercepted conversations among the top Iraqi leaders. It could be because, like Osama bin Laden, they decided to go underground. But also, possibly, "their phones melted", as one official put it frankly.

At 12.30pm, the Iraqis announced they had shot down an Allied jet, as they put a bounty on such a feat. But there was no confirmation from American or British forces.

The Iraqi leadership is now counting on the inner core of the military to protect it: the 60,000-strong Republican Guard, the 15,000-member Special Republican Guard and the 1,000 soldiers of the Special Security Organisation.

US forces have dropped leaflets and aimed radio broadcasts at commanders of the crack units, reportedly sending e-mails to generals. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, said America was reaching out to Iraqi leaders and military officers "with every conceivable mode and method".

But some were sceptical about the possible impact."Females will work. E-mails won't," said a Kuwaiti military planner.

President Bush's Friday began early and he was on the phone to Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser, from the Oval Office at 7am, immersed in war planning. His early morning briefing also consisted of talks with the CIA and FBI.

Hopefully, by yesterday, General Tommy Franks had mastered the technology of the video conference that eluded him in the crucial session on Wednesday at which he had discussed with the President whether to launch the preemptive strike against the Iraqi leadership – General Franks had pressed the wrong button to talk to the President.

"Don't worry, Tommy, I haven't lost faith in you," the President told him, to laughter. Moments later, President Bush said: "Let's go." The war was on. As the invasion unfurled, directed against Iraq's strategic nerve centres, more protests erupted around the world. About midday, after Friday prayers in the Yemeni capital, Sana, where 30,000 people had gathered to demonstrate against the war, two protesters were shot dead and dozens injured by police as the marchers chanted "Death to America." Other big anti-war demonstrations were organised in Germany and Australia.

Violence broke out last night in Madrid, when Spanish riot police fired rubber bullets and charged crowds of demonstrators in the heart of the city in an attempt to drive them from the parliament building.

Meanwhile, a diplomatic battle was being fought in the wings. Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, criticised the war, saying it could destabilise the former Soviet republics.

But more importantly, daylight was appearing between America and its main war ally, about the conduct of hostilities and, perhaps more importantly, about what should happen when the fighting was over. The short-lived flag incident at Umm Qasr was an early example.

While the Pentagon had no comment on the incident, the MoD implied strong disapproval of any flag-raising. An MoD spokeswoman said: "We don't come in as conquerors, but as liberators." She declined to say if representations had been made to have the American removed.

The fearsome rhetoric of US defence officials, starting with Mr Rumsfeld, and US military commanders, was another point of friction. British officials reacted with some relief at the postponement of the planned US bombing blitz on Baghdad, coded "Shock and Awe".

"Shock and Awe" is exactly the sort of aggressive phrase British officials have tried to avoid for fear of alienating public opinion even further. They acknowledge privately the uncompromising language of "tyrants" and "monsters", "eliminating" and "hammering", employed by US spokesmen has been a great liability in convincing the British public to support the military operation.

Already, there are signs of disagreement between the British, on the one hand, who are trying to mobilise European support for post-war assistance to Iraq, and the United States. Two of the main points at issue are how Iraq will be administered and who will control the proceeds of Iraq's oil sales.

The British and EU view is that the United Nations should be involved from the earliest possible stage. The EU summit statement said: "The UN must continue to play a central role during and after the current crisis". This would include taking charge of Iraq's oil money. But the US administration, which has openly scorned the UN as a hopelessly divided and ineffective organisation, has long been preparing detailed plans for the military administration of Iraq – the so-called "day after" scenario. These plans do not appear to envisage any big role for the UN.

Crucial difficulties must still be overcome within the EU. The first face to face meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Chirac since the deep Anglo-French rift at the United Nations was never going to be easy, either personally or politically for Tony Blair.

Downing Street had agonised over whether the Prime Minister should attend the EU summit and whether he should stay overnight in Brussels. In the event, he did both. Arriving at the VIP entrance of the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels Mr Blair looked pale and drawn and refused to comment.

Throughout his brief stay in Brussels, the tension could be sensed, from the body language, and from the briefings from Downing Street, which reflected the depth of Anglo-French hostility.

Part of that was a deliberate strategy on the part of the British delegation: having played the anti-French card so hard and to such effect in the domestic debate, it was hard for Downing Street to back off. But it also reflected the diplomatic reality: few observers could remember a time when Anglo-French relations had been at such a low. At the dinner on the seventh floor of the large block, the EU leaders dined on tuna carpaccio and lamb.

The atmosphere was tense: one official called it "niggly", another "glacial". On Iraq, Mr Blair spoke first – after a lengthy pause when the subject was introduced by Costas Simitis, the Prime Minister of Greece, which holds the EU presidency. Then M. Chirac put his, rather different, perspective.

There was then a wrangle over the terms of a joint declaration to be made by the leaders even though it had been approved by senior diplomats from the member states.

But the real ice-breaker finally came around 1pm yesterday. As the leaders assembled to meet the heads of the EU-applicant countries, Mr Blair and M. Chirac shook hands, then peeled off to a private room to hold a discussion. With that, Mr Blair left for the Brussels military airfield from where he flew back to Northolt.

For once, Downing Street accentuated the positive. "It was a good, long discussion," Mr Blair's official spokesman said.

At 6.19pm the night sky of Baghdad was lit up again by another apocalyptic vision. But this time, Mr Rumsfeld made clear that the long-awaited air war had begun.

Air raid sirens sounded across Baghdad as Iraqi forces laced the sky with anti-aircraft fire. The deadly precision of volleys of missiles sent plumes of smoke into the night from the presidential compound in central Baghdad. Nearly all of the government buildings in the western part of the city seemed to have been destroyed.

Mr Rumsfeld said President Saddam was "starting to lose control of the country". The American military predicted hundreds of targets would be smashed. Much of the Iraqi capital seemed to be ablaze as over 300 missiles rained down. Two hours later, the second wave of attacks arrived.

The day finished with good news for the US-led coalition – and potentially very bad news indeed. It was confirmed late last night that an Iraqi general commanding the 51st division in southern Iraq had surrendered with his deputy and many of his men.

But, ominously, the Turkish government announced that it planned to defy Washington and send troops into the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq – threatening an uncontrollable conflict between two of America's allies.