Mosul, Iraq ? Barefoot and wearing civilian clothes, the young Iraqi fighters marched Friday — but away from battle, not into it.

With Saddam Hussein’s forces abandoning the battle for Iraq’s third-largest city without firing a shot, thousands of young men left their military positions, dropped their weapons and headed south toward Baghdad and home.

It was a humbling hike for the ex-soldiers, most unarmed and carrying little or nothing as they headed down a blacktop highway. A strong sun beat down as some said it might take as long as a week for the trek to their hometowns.

“The Iraqi army evaporated,” said Lt. Col. Robert Waltemeyer, commander of a U.S. Special Operations unit that helped secure Mosul without any bloodshed. There was no immediate estimate on the size of the force that disappeared.

“They may have just melted into the population,” Waltemeyer said at an air base in Mosul. The final holdout in the north was Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, which could provide the regime’s last stand.

An Iraqi man walks with a young boy past the destroyed remains of the Iraqi government security service building in Kirkuk. Iraqi fighters have left Kirkuk and Mosul, both in northern Iraq. The building was hit by coalition bombing when the city was still in Iraqi government control.

With the Iraqi 5th Corps opting to vanish before they were vanquished, U.S.-led forces took over Mosul — only to find the city of low-slung buildings and wide boulevards consumed by a maelstrom of looting and thuggery.

Chaos ruled in the streets, with banks ransacked and ambulances hijacked at gunpoint. The turmoil — just a day after a similar free-for-all in the northern city of Kirkuk — was a potent reminder of the huge challenges ahead in postwar Iraq.

“There is absolutely no security,” said Dr. Darfar Ibrahim Hasan, a staff physician at Saddam General Hospital. “The city has fallen into anarchy.”

Waltemeyer, who met with local leaders, announced a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew and said U.S. forces would not tolerate looting or reprisals.

At Jumhuriya Hospital, the fleet of eight ambulances was taken at gunpoint just hours after the Iraqi troops left the city open for Kurdish fighters aided by U.S. Special Forces.