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"I would anticipate that the major conflict engagements are over," Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. He verbalize 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 young days, down from about 1,000 or more a day. And Monday, he said, pronounced the last day that aircraft from all five aircraft carriers would fly missions over Iraq. Plans were inform to scale back the American naval presence in the Persian disconnectedness 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 sole(prenominal) remaining carrier group in the gulf. Officials also said oneness of the two groups in the Red Sea, the USS Harry S. Truman or the USS The odore Roosevelt, could depart soon. densification fighting Monday against Iraki targets in Tikrit, Saddam Husseins hometown, was not as crimson as some expected. McChrystal said the Iraqi forces there lacked a " lucid defense." Still, he cautioned against any suggestion that danger had passed for coalition forces. Meanwhile, U.S. troops gestate they induct found 11 wide awake 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 vulcanised "about 1,000 pounds" of documents inside them, said Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakley of the Armys 101st Airborne Division. U.N. weapons inspectors in February "found nothing untoward" at an ammunition filling shew close to where the United States says troops have found the labs, a U.N. reexamination team spokesman said Monday. In February, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell t old the U.N. Security Council that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs on at least 18 flatbed trucks. disarm Iraq of its alleged weapons of mass destruction had been among the coalitions foremost goals entering the war, officials said. To date, there have been no confirmed discoveries of any such weaponry. The "only significant combat action" Monday took place in Tikrit, the lone major Iraqi holdout, said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks of U.S. Central Command. After heavy airstrikes and sporadic battles Sunday, coalition forces from the south, westbound and north moved early Monday into the center of the north-central Iraqi city, the hometown of the deposed Iraqi president.