April 13 – Sunday
United States sends home the B-2 Stealth bombers it deployed to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. [If military personnel from the Air Force and Navy are being sent home, is this an indication that the US believes that it has won the war? If so, when will it accept responsibility for security as an occupying force? – Ed.]

April 12 – Saturday
In Baghdad
US troops in Baghdad fight off an attack by about 15 gunmen on the west bank of the Tigris in a 20-minute battle. US tanks are firing towards the River Tigris and the north of the city. One marine is killed by a gunman on the east bank, at a hospital near the Palestine Hotel.
Sunni Muslims are fighting gun battles with their Shia neighbours in Baghdad.
British and American forces are blamed by Arab media for the breakdown of law and order in Baghdad.
Northern Iraq
Turkey sees no immediate need to send troops into Iraq
US reinforcements reported to have reached Mosul.
A street battle between Kurds and Arabs is reported in Mosul. 15 people have been killed and at least 200 injured.
Kurdish soldiers begin leaving northern city of Kirkuk
American paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade discovered what they described as suspicious warheads and rocket components outside the former Iraqi governor's office in Kirkuk, a tantalizing but inconclusive find.
Delta Company, 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, said civil affairs soldiers would be moving into Kirkuk.
Elements of the First Marine Division have been assigned to take Tikrit.
Marines also moved toward Baqubah, a town northeast of Baghdad.
The main Iranian rebel group, the People's Mujahedin, says 18 of its fighters have been killed and 43 wounded in fighting near its camps in north-eastern Iraq. It accuses Tehran of sending agents into Iraq to mount attacks on its bases and says Iranian-backed forces have seized the border town of Khanaqin.
Southern Iraq
US 4th Infantry Division begins entering Iraq.
UK military commander in Basra says his troops cannot provide a fully functioning police force in the city
US marines take the town of Kut. US marine commander, Colonel Richard Mills, said several large fires in the city suggested that looters had moved in quickly.
Elsewhere in Iraq
Fighting in Qaim, near Syria, is dying down
An assault on Iraq's 12th Armored Brigade was suspended on Friday night when American commanders received reports that the brigade might surrender. It is stationed at Ramadi, where it guarded the western approaches to Baghdad.
American officials still have to contend with snipers, suicide bombers and ambushes by small numbers of Iraqi paramilitary troops and Islamic militants from Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Sudan
Gen. Amir al-Saadi, Iraq's top science adviser, turned himself in to US marines in Baghdad after telling a German journalist that Iraq had no chemical or biological weapons. He said Iraq's last report to Hans Blix, a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations, accounted for 550 missing artillery shells filled with mustard gas and that the country was close to accounting for all missing weapons of mass destruction, including VX nerve gas, when the war overtook it. [Was the rush to war necessary to prevent Iraq from fulfilling all the conditions of UN resolution 1441? – Ed.]
Outside Iraq
USS Kitty Hawk may leave the Gulf in a couple of days
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warns civil war could erupt in Iraq unless American and British forces restore law and order.
The United States has accepted the need for a further UN resolution to pave the way for a joint effort for the reconstruction of Iraq in a statement by the finance ministers of the seven leading industrial countries.
Germany will be insisting on debt repayment and restructuring. [Was this one of the reasons Germany opposed the war? – Ed.]

If the war was about bringing democracy to Iraq, will Egypt be next? Probably not.
Human rights groups accuse Egyptian authorities of detaining hundreds of people, including opposition member of Parliament Muhammad Farid Hassanein, in brutal crackdown on people protesting war in Iraq; witnesses say detainees were beaten and tortured