Artillery explosions and gunfire could still be heard during Saturday afternoon and a column of smoke billowed over the Old City riverside, the Reuters correspondent said.

A US-led international coalition is providing air and ground support to the eight-month campaign to wrest back Mosul, by far the largest city seized by Daesh in 2014.

Almost exactly three years ago, the ultra-hardline group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared from Mosul a "caliphate" over adjoining parts of Iraq and Syria.

'Fighting for every meter'

Dozens of Daesh insurgents were killed on Saturday and others tried to escape by swimming across Tigris, state TV said. Most of those making a last stand were foreigners, it added.

Iraqi commanders say the militants were fighting for every meter with snipers, grenades and suicide bombers, forcing security forces to fight house-to-house in the densely populated maze of narrow alleyways.

"The battle has reached the phase of chasing the insurgents in remaining blocks," the Iraqi military media office said in a statement. "Some members of Daesh have surrendered," it added.

The road where the soldiers celebrated was scarred with gaping holes from explosions and rubble from a flattened multi-storey shopping mall.

Rubbish and ammunition boxes were strewn around and the only civilians seen were a group of about 15 women, children and elderly, some of them wounded, sheltering in a damaged petrol station. Security forces medics were giving them first aid.

Months of urban warfare has displaced 900,000 people, about half the city's pre-war population, and killed thousands, according to aid organizations.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared the end of Daesh's "state of falsehood" a week ago, after security forces took Mosul's medieval Grand al-Nuri mosque - although only after retreating militants blew it up.

Stripped of Mosul, Daesh's dominion in Iraq will be reduced to mainly rural, desert areas west and south of the city where tens of thousands of people live. The militants are expected to keep up attacks on selected targets across Iraq.

The United Nations predicts it will cost more than $1 billion to repair basic infrastructure in Mosul. In some of the worst-affected areas, almost no buildings appear to have escaped damage and Mosul's dense construction means the extent of the devastation might be underestimated, UN officials said.

The fall of Mosul also exposes ethnic and sectarian fractures between Arabs and Kurds over disputed territories or between Sunnis and the Shi?ite majority that have plagued Iraq for more than a decade..

Mosul is a majority Sunni city who has long complained of being marginalized by the Shi'ite-led governments installed after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iraq's regional Kurdish leader said this week that the government in Baghdad had failed to prepare a post-battle political, security and governance plan.