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Insurgents Blow Up an Iraqi Oil Pipeline
By Edward Wong
The New York Times
Wednesday 03 November 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents blew up a northern oil export pipeline on Tuesday, dealing a severe blow to the national economy, even as car bombs and gun battles across the country left at least 12 Iraqis dead, Iraqi officials said.
The sabotage of the northern oil pipeline forced a shutdown of crude oil exports to a port in Turkey, Iraqi officials said. The pipeline pumps out 400,000 barrels a day of crude oil and is the frequent target of sabotage.
Hours after the explosion, firefighters were still battling the pipeline blaze near the city of Kirkuk, where pipelines run from oil fields west to the country's largest refinery in Bayji and north to Turkey.
An Iraqi oil official in Baghdad told The Associated Press that the amount of crude oil in storage at the port of Ceyhan in Turkey was down to four million barrels, half of the port's storage capacity.
The attacks on oil pipelines near Kirkuk and around Basra in the south, where the oil fields are much more extensive, have sharply cut into Iraq's main economic hope. American and Iraqi officials are relying on steady oil exports to help revive the stagnant economy in a country where the unemployment rate hovers at 60 percent.
The Arab news network Al Jazeera reported Tuesday night that it had received a new videotape in which the kidnappers of a British-Iraqi aid official, Margaret Hassan, threaten to turn her over to the group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi within 48 hours if Britain does not withdraw its troops from Iraq.
In the first of the bombings on Tuesday, insurgents drove a car bomb up to the Ministry of Education offices in northwestern Baghdad in the morning, killing at least six people and wounding dozens more, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman.
The blast took place in the Adhamiya neighborhood a Sunni-dominated area generally hostile to the Americans. People at the scene said two ministry guards in the parking lot, a father and his son, died immediately in the blast.
In the volatile northern city of Mosul, a car bomb aimed at a military convoy near the police academy killed one person and wounded at least seven security officers, hospital officials said. The target appeared to be Maj. Gen. Rashid Flayeh, the commander of a special security force who had arrived in the city just days ago to assist the local police. He was unhurt in the blast, police officials said.
At 1 p.m., another car bomb exploded by a convoy of Iraqi National Guardsmen in Mosul, killing two civilians and wounding seven others, hospital officials said. Clashes between insurgents and Iraqi guardsmen in the city's Widha neighborhood left three civilians dead, the officials said.
The latest attacks came about halfway through the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. During the holiday, the number of attacks in Iraq per day has spiked by 30 percent, and suicide car bombs appear to be an increasingly common weapon, American military officials say.
Since April, when a two-front uprising convulsed the country, American-led forces have been unable to dampen what appears to be a growing insurgency, much of it led by disenfranchised Sunni Muslims ousted from power with the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
In recent weeks, American military officials have been gathering their troops for a planned invasion of the insurgent stronghold of Falluja, 35 miles west of the capital, in the hopes that crushing that sanctuary will break the backbone of the insurgency. Thousands of rebels are believed to have dug into positions in the city, awaiting the assault.
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has said he is ready to call for a sweeping offensive in order to bring Falluja into his fold before elections scheduled for January. But Iraq's president, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, a leader of one of the largest Sunni tribes in the country, said in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper on Monday that he absolutely opposed any military action.
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