Khanaqin, Iraq — The change came in the late afternoon, when the sinking desert sun softened the city with shadows. People stepped out from their doorways and the streets began to fill. Drivers honked their horns, young men clapped and whistled. "Long live George Bush!" an old man screamed in English.

Power changed hands in this Iraqi city of 400,000 Wednesday night. The army and Baath Party officials fled before first light. Kurdish troops — and a dozen U.S. Special Forces soldiers — nosed in just after dawn. But the citizens of Khanaqin, who had lived under the Baath dictatorship for 35 years, were not easily convinced.

Much of the world saw Baghdad celebrate on Wednesday; watched the television pictures as images of President Saddam Hussein were ripped down, as the delirious mobs greeted U.S. marines. But here, a two-hour drive away, almost no one knew that Mr. Hussein's rule has ended. Satellite television is illegal, Iraqi government TV and radio are off the air, and only a handful of people own forbidden shortwave radios.

Mohammed Ayad, an 18-year-old high-school student, has one and has followed the news on British Broadcasting Corp. radio. He rushed to tell a reporter that U.S. President George W. Bush is the greatest man alive. But when his aunts heard Mr. Ayad give his name, they shrieked in horror and pleaded that he not be named in print.

Mr. Ayad was amused. "I told them from the first day of the war: 'I know about the U.S.A. and what they can do.' But my whole family refused to believe me," he said.

His aunts were visibly trembling. "I'm still afraid of the regime. I think they're coming back," one of them explained, her voice just above a whisper.

She believes it because it has happened before. Her neighbours edged out of the door to join the conversation, and Hanan Ahmed, 67, tried to explain.

"We lived through 1991," she said, referring to the uprisings in Iraq that were encouraged by U.S. President George Bush, the father of the current leader, who then refused to provide air support and allowed Mr. Hussein's brutal suppression of the rebellion. "We remember 1991. And because of that, I will not believe we are free until he [Mr. Hussein] is dead. If there is Iraq, there must be Saddam."

Asked to describe the worst thing about life under the Baath Party, she froze, then looked around wildly. The question was asked in the past tense, but Mrs. Ahmed clearly believed she still lived under the Baath Party.

But emboldened by her giddy teenaged daughters, she began to speak, the words coming faster and faster. "As Kurds, we were second-class citizens. No, eighth-class. We couldn't get jobs. We couldn't own land. We couldn't buy houses."

Reflexively, Mrs. Ahmed looked up and down the road.

As the day wore on, the shuttered streets gradually filled with Kurdish peshmerga fighters. They tried to put out the flames at the Baath Party headquarters, where officials set the records room on fire as they left town. Young peshmerga sifted through the smouldering embers, extracting the records of party membership and toting them off; perhaps for future prosecution, perhaps for a less orderly meting out of justice.

A man named Salah came to have a look at the police station. He displayed the scars on his back and sides from his interrogation here seven months ago, when he was caught selling flour for more than the official price. With some persuasion, he gave a tour through the rubble and shattered glass to the room where, he said, he was beaten and hung from manacles.

He, too, was nervous. Asked if he had seen what happened in Baghdad the day before, he said no. Told that the U.S. military largely controlled the city, that people were tearing down images of Mr. Hussein, that the Iraqi leader was said to be dead or in hiding, Salah looked incredulous.

"He will never be finished, Saddam won't," he said. "Until the day I die, I won't believe this."

During another encounter later in the day, however, he asked twice: "Do you truly think they're finished?"

The Arabs of Khanaqin appeared to think so: only one or two were in the street. The Kurds claim Khanaqin as a traditionally Kurdish town, but under Mr. Hussein's policy of Arabization, most of the Kurdish population was driven out and today only a quarter of the citizens are Kurds. The Arabs have either fled or are in hiding.

The Iraqi military presence has also vanished. Outside the city, there were acres of abandoned foxholes, and tanks left by the side of the road. Peshmerga had spray-painted them all with "PUK" in Arabic, for Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "That means they're reserved," one young man explained helpfully. Kurds were coming south in any vehicle they could find to loot blankets, chairs and metal railings from the military camps.

Somehow, just before dusk, there began to be consensus among the people left in Khanaqin that with or without Americans in the streets, it was safe for them to celebrate. With no marines to welcome, they had to settle for a Canadian reporter. An old man offered roses, and young women gave an embrace. And Mr. Ayad, the high-schooler, said exactly what he thought: "Saddam was a vampire, a human killer."

He didn't care who was listening.