President Saddam Hussein on Monday promised a quick Iraqi victory over British and US forces, after the country came under a fearsome battering in more air raids.

"Victory is near," Saddam said in an address to the nation broadcast on state television.

"Hit your enemy with force and precision," said the Iraqi strongman, dressed in an olive green military uniform.

Saddam said US and British forces were advancing into "a dead end", following reports they were just 150 kilometers (90 miles) from the capital.

"The more they advance into Iraqi territory, the more they head into a dead end," he said in in his second speech since the US-led war to topple his regime began with an attempt to "decapitate" him by aerial bombing Thursday.

The address offered evidence that he had survived the bid as it made reference to ongoing battles with coalition forces in the southern Iraqi town of Umm Qasr.

However, the Iraqi president is known to have doubles and it was not clear whether the speech was live or recorded, as is always the case in Baghdad.

Baghdad was rocked late Sunday and early Monday by the most intense bombardment of the capital in 48 hours and huge clouds of smoke rose over the city in the morning.

Air sirens sounded in the Iraqi capital again at 9:40 a.m. (0640 GMT), AFP correspondents reported.

There were no immediate explosions or bursts of anti-aircraft activity around Baghdad.

The Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera also reported that the main northern Iraqi city of Mosul was rocked by three fresh US-led air raids on Monday, the last of which hit at about 7:20 a.m. (0420 GMT).

Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries opened up during the first two raids, the network's correspondent said, without being able to give specific information on the targets.

And US warplanes struck Iraqi frontlines between the northern oil capital of Kirkuk and the Kurdish-held town of Chamchamal for the first time early Monday in a sign that a key second front against Baghdad was about to kick into action, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

The strikes came as US forces were reported to be closing in on Baghdad in their bid to topple Saddam after moving past stiff resistance in southern Iraq and suffering their first significant losses in the Euphrates river town of Nasiriyah.

The assault came after frightened-looking US soldiers were paraded before the cameras of Iraqi television, prisoners of war put on display in a show calculated to humiliate Washington and rally support for Iraq in the Arab world.

Al-Jazeera television first broadcast the Iraqi television footage, which also showed the bodies of what looked like dead US soldiers.

The corpses lay stretched in a makeshift morgue, grisly red stains soaking through their desert-coloured camouflage uniforms.

The body of one young soldier rested in a thickening pool of blood.

Some appeared to have been shot in the head.

The Iraqi television commentator said it was proof the United States "does not respect its sons and is not working to guarantee them a stable life, but is sending them into a holocaust." The footage then showed five soldiers, captured in a war US and British leaders say will end only when Saddam is toppled from power, anxiously answering questions with an Iraq TV microphone shoved in their face.

"Why did you come to Iraq?" a voice off screen was heard asking one young soldier, who nervously turned his close-shaven head back and forth from the camera to someone not in view.

"Because I was told to come here," he said. "I didn't come here to kill anybody." Another, from Texas, was asked if he had been greeted in Iraq with flowers or with guns. "I do not understand," he replied. One of the three others was a woman.ald Rumsfeld called it "part of Iraqi propaganda." Iraq said the troops had been killed in fierce fighting in the southern city of Nasiriyah, where it charged that 25 US and British soldiers were dead and an unspecified number wounded in the worst known coalition setback so far.

Britain said none of its troops had been taken prisoner in Iraq but that two British airmen were killed by friendly fire from a US Patriot missile.

Throughout day four of the US-led war, Iraqi officials vowed coalition troops were headed to their doom even as reporters travelling with ground forces reported they were speeding over the desert and now just 100 kilometres (60 miles) from Baghdad.

"We let them go for a walk in the desert, but all our towns will resist," Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said. The area of Ramadan's Baghdad office was pounded in the night-time raid.

US President George W. Bush vowed that anyone who did not treat POWs under the Geneva conventions would be later dealt with as war criminals. Iraq said it would respect the conventions.

The International Committee for the Red Cross said the broadcast of the soldiers was a violation of the international rules of war.

But the images of US prisoners will have renewed the spirit of Saddam's true believers in Baghdad, where US officials said more than 300 cruise missiles fell in Friday night's "shock and awe" assault alone.

Rumours that US or British pilots had ejected over the city brought hundreds of onlookers to the banks of the Tigris River, where the airmen were alleged to have been hiding out.

The coalition denied the report but that was far from enough to stop the quest for the men, who would win their captors a massive cash reward from Saddam's government - Sapa-AFP