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BAGHDAD, Friday (Reuters) U.S. and Kurdish forces took Iraq's third city of Mosul without a fight on Friday, sealing their victory in the north, but gunbattles and looting continued in Baghdad in the absence of any government.

Kurdish guerrillas said they would hand over the important oil hub of Kirkuk to U.S. troops later on Friday. The rich city, traditional capital of the Kurds, fell on Thursday to mixed units of Kurdish guerrillas and U.S. special forces.

In Baghdad, Iraqi gunmen, apparently from the long oppressed Shi'ite majority in the east-side slums, battled Fedayeen paramilitaries loyal to toppled president Saddam Hussein overnight, U.S. military sources said.

Elsewhere in the capital, Reuters correspondent Khaled Yacoub Oweis saw a fresh outbreak of intense looting in an area newly abandoned by non-Iraqi Arab paramilitary fighters. The Trade Ministry building was on fire, he added.

Hundreds of Iraqi civilians besieged the national headquarters of Iraq's military intelligence, searching for relatives they say had been detained there.

The chaos in Baghdad, the murder of a religious leader in the holy city of Najaf and a suicide bombing at a Baghdad checkpoint on Thursday highlighted the problems U.S. troops face in restoring order despite a crushing military victory.

Humanitarian organisations criticised the U.S. troops, saying the failure to prevent looting and anarchy threatened their efforts to provide desperately needed assistance. Two days after U.S. forces drove tanks into the heart of Baghdad, the whereabouts of Saddam and other former Iraqi leaders were still unknown.

U.S. troops moved to take control of the strategic prize of Kirkuk and began by spreading through the oilfields near the city, which provide 40 percent of Iraq's oil revenue. Hundreds of dejected Iraqis were seen walking south.

The Kurds have promised to leave Kirkuk, helping to calm Turkish alarm after the Kurdish "peshmerga" militia took it over in a largely bloodless rout of Iraqi forces.

"Yes, we expect to be leaving when the Americans arrive, and that may well be later today," said Mam Rostam, a Kurdish commander whose forces had rushed into Kirkuk, apparently without the full agreement of Washington.

Ankara fears the Kurds could use the city's wealth to finance an independent state and stimulate separatist demands by Turkey's large Kurdish minority.

A Kurdish commander at a checkpoint just outside Mosul said fighters loyal to Saddam had fled. Reuters journalists in Mosul said they saw no fighting but crowds went on a looting rampage, stripping buildings bare and torching a central market.

Events in the north left Saddam's home town of Tikrit, which is 175 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad on the main road from Mosul, as the one significant target left to the U.S.-led forces. Mosul is 390 km (240 miles) north of the capital.

U.S. forces pressed on with efforts to hunt down deposed Iraqi leaders.

A U.S. aircraft hit the residence of Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former head of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence service, with six "smart bombs". The results of the attack on the building, which was also an operations centre for the intelligence service, were not yet known.

There was no indication U.S. forces thought Saddam might be in the house near Ramadi, 110 km (70 miles) west of Baghdad.

In Najaf on Thursday, a mob stabbed and shot to death Iraqi Shi'ite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei and an aide in the gold-domed Imam Ali Mosque, the city's holiest shrine. The killings seemed certain to widen divisions and sow hatred among Shi'ites, who are 60 percent of the population.

Abdul Majid returned to Iraq only last week but his presence provoked intense criticism from other Iraqi Shi'ite dissidents keen to assert their authority after the fall of Saddam.

A suicide bomber detonated explosives at a U.S. checkpoint in the capital on Thursday evening. "Some are dead in the attack but I don't know how many," Marine officer Matt Baker told Reuters. A Pentagon spokesman said four soldiers were wounded.

Fear of another suicide attack led U.S. Marines to open fire on a vehicle which ignored warnings to stop at a checkpoint in the southern city of Nassiriya on Friday, and two children inside were killed, the Marines said.

Latest figures for U.S. war losses list 105 dead and 11 missing. Thirty British troops have been killed. There is no authoritative estimate for Iraqi military and civilian casualties but they certainly run into the thousands.

The immediate problem facing American troops in Baghdad was quelling remaining pockets of resistance and restoring order.

Looters carted off bottles of wine and whisky, guns and paintings of half-naked women on Thursday from the home of Uday, Saddam's feared playboy son. They also picked clean his yacht and made off with some of his white Arabian horses.

Severe looting has also raged in the southern city of Basra, now under the military control of British troops.

Aid officials said U.S. and British troops were obliged by international law to prevent chaos.

"The picture is a very dark one. There is absolutely no security on the street," said Veronique Taveau, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. "Humanitarian assistance will be hurt."

The International Committee of the Red Cross said one hospital in central Baghdad had been attacked by armed looters and others had been closed.

U.S. President George W. Bush promised Iraqis the United States and its allies would help end the chaos.

"Coalition forces will help maintain law and order, so that Iraqis can live in security," Bush said in a taped message.

The United States is trying to organise a meeting of Iraqi opposition leaders in the next few days to start the process of selecting an interim government. Meanwhile, a humanitarian effort to bring food and other supplies to Iraq was beginning. Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said a British ship unloaded more than 200,000 tons of food, water and medicine at the southern port of Umm Qasr. The United States has still not confirmed finding any of the weapons of mass destruction it says Iraq had been hiding - the issue which prompted the invasion.

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