"In this operation we cleaned up the city from all the bad guys and terrorists," Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib told a few reporters inside Samarra.
"This operation is the best operation we have done in all Iraqi areas," he said from inside the Samarra city hall, around which fierce fighting took place on Friday before it was recaptured.
"The Iraqi government has taken control of the situation in Samarra except for some pockets of resistance," a government spokesman told AFP, a day after close to 100 insurgents were killed in a massive US-Iraqi onslaught.
Sporadic explosions were still heard in the afternoon Saturday, but the bulk of the fighting appeared to be over, AFP correspondents on the ground said, adding that most of the city was deprived of water and electricity.
On Friday, a massive force of 3,000 US troops and 2,000 Iraqi auxiliaries stormed the city, a key bastion in the Sunni insurgent belt north of Baghdad.
Iraq's National Security Advisor Qassim Daoud claimed forces entered the city at the request of Samarra's residents and vowed the operation would continue until the area is "cleansed of terrorists, criminals and former regime elements".
The first major push to reclaim insurgent-controlled areas in the run-up to January elections was also the most significant military operation in Iraq since an unsuccessful US onslaught on Fallujah west of Baghdad in April.
The Samarra offensive marked a bloody start to the month after devastating Baghdad car bombs killed at least 34 children on Thursday and brought the death toll for September to at least 575, making it one of the bloodiest months since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003.
A US military statement said 109 rebels and one US soldier were killed in Friday's assault on Samarra. Local hospitals reported 90 killed and 180 wounded.
The US airforce carried out another of its almost daily strikes on what the military says are suspected hideouts of foe Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi's network in the Fallujah area, killing at least seven people and wounding 13, a medical source said.
A Fallujah doctor said women and children were among the victims. The US military says its raids on Fallujah are "precision hits" and questions the hospital casualty counts coming from the city.
The military also reported a US soldier was killed in the Baghdad area overnight but provided no details.
A total of five US soldiers were wounded Saturday in bomb attacks outside Fallujah, in the northern city of Mosul and in Baghdad's radical Shiite stronghold of Sadr City, the military said.
Unable to respond directly to the military might of the coalition, insurgents have increasingly resorted to hostage-taking in recent months to wreak chaos in Iraq and eclipse progress by the interim Iraqi government.
The militant Army of Ansar al-Sunna group, which is linked to Al-Qaeda, posted a video on its website Saturday showing an Iraqi man being beheaded after "confessing" he was a contractor with US forces.
Another group, which has detained two French reporters for six weeks, demanded in a video broadcast on Saturday by Al-Jazeera television that Jakarta release Abu Bakar Bashir - a cleric suspected of links with Al-Qaeda - in exchange for two Indonesian women it kidnapped.
According to a previous video, the two Indonesians, identified in Jakarta as Rosidah binti Anom and Rafikan binti Amin, were among a group of 10 hostages which included two Lebanese and six Iraqis. All work for a British electronics company contracted by the coalition forces.
Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who leads the world's most populous Muslim country, which has been a consistent critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq, appealed for the release of the women.
Bashir is thought to be the mastermind of the Jemaah Islamiyah group, which is suspected of having carried out the devastating Bali bombing in October 2002 in which 202 people were killed.
Confusion still surrounded the fate of French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot after the failure on Friday of an independent operation aimed at freeing the pair.
Self-proclaimed mediator Didier Julia, a French MP with ties to Saddam's former regime, admitted in Damascus that his assistant Philippe Brett had failed to extricate the reporters but blamed the US military for the botched mercy mission.
A high-raking US officer dismissed the accusations while the French government was awkwardly distancing itself from the rogue MP's private endeavour, with President Jacques Chirac expressing his "concern".
Eight Iraqi customs officers have been found dead and the valuable cargo of antiquities they were transporting from southern Iraq is missing, police said Saturday.
"Seven customs officers and their commander, reported missing on September 27, have been found dead in the region of Latifiyah," a Sunni Arab insurgent bastion immediately south of Baghdad, the chief of police in the nearby Shia majority provincial capital of Hilla, told AFP.
The missing objects are believed to be those recovered on Tuesday by Italian police and Iraqi customs officers after they dismantled a criminal ring trafficking archaeological treasures dating from the Sumerian period some 50 centuries ago.
The police recovered around 70 fragments of stone tablets bearing traces of cuneiform script - one of the world's oldest - 12 finely carved vases and a substantial number of coins, bracelets and other pieces of jewellery. Two men were arrested during the operation and a number of guns seized. Hilla police chief General Qais al-Mamuri said that the bodies were found burnt after their convoy was attacked and could only be recovered after a skirmish with unidentified armed men.
"The archaeological items were not recovered and the bodies have been taken to hospital," he added.
Customs officers in the southern city of Nasiriyah said on Thursday that they had lost contact with the convoy carrying the recovered objects.
Colonel Jaafar Alwan said then he thought the convoy might have been ambushed and did not exclude the possibility that the traffickers were trying to get back the antiquities.
Italy has about 3,000 troops deployed in the Nasiriyah region as part of the US-led multinational force in Iraq.