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Prime Minister

"I would anticipate that the major combat engagements are over," Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. He said U.S. forces are moving into a phase of "smaller, albeit sharper fights."

McChrystal said the number of daily air missions had dropped to 700 or 800 in recent days, down from about 1,000 or more a day. And Monday, he said, marked the last day that aircraft from all five aircraft carriers would fly missions over Iraq.

Plans were announced to scale back the American naval presence in the Persian Gulf by bringing home two carrier groups in the coming days.

The USS Kitty Hawk and USS Constellation could leave the Persian Gulf in the next several days, officials said. That would leave the USS Nimitz, which recently replaced the USS Abraham Lincoln, as the only remaining carrier group in the gulf.

Officials also said one of the two groups in the Red Sea, the USS Harry S. Truman or the USS Theodore Roosevelt, could depart soon.

Coalition fighting Monday against Iraqi targets in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, was not as fierce as some expected. McChrystal said the Iraqi forces there lacked a "coherent defense."

Still, he cautioned against any suggestion that danger had passed for coalition forces.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops believe they have found 11 mobile chemical and biological laboratories buried south of Baghdad outside Karbala, a U.S. general said Monday. (Full story)

No chemical or biological weapons were found along with the labs, but soldiers recovered "about 1,000 pounds" of documents inside them, said Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakley of the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

U.N. weapons inspectors in February "found nothing untoward" at an ammunition filling plant close to where the United States says troops have found the labs, a U.N. inspection team spokesman said Monday.

In February, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council that Iraq had mobile biological...