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Pipeline blast cuts Iraq's oil exports by 25% 11/05/2004 - 07:32:51
Insurgents blasted an oil pipeline, setting off a huge blaze and slashing Iraq’s daily oil exports by around 25%.
American tanks and helicopters destroyed radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s headquarters in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Sadr City in weekend clashes. US officials said 35 Iraqis were killed before fighting ended just before dawn yesterday.
Later, a large but distant explosion was heard in central Baghdad, and Al Jazeera television reported renewed clashes in Sadr City. The US command had no comment.
In a statement broadcast by Lebanon’s Al Manar television, the “political forces of Sadr City” appealed to U.S. authorities to stop attacks on the district and to ”peacefully solve this conflict without violence, terrorism and extreme cruelty.”
An aide to al-Sadr vowed to step up the campaign against the US-led occupation.
“The second phase of the fight has not been born yet,” the aide, Hossam al-Husseini, said in the southern city of Najaf, where al-Sadr has taken refuge. “This is a struggle for independence. It will end when the Americans leave Iraq.”
Elsewhere, US Marines entered the restive city of Fallujah for the first time since a bloody, three-week siege ended last month. The Marines, accompanied by Iraqi forces, remained in the city for about an hour and left without incident.
Three more US soldiers have died in Iraq – two from hostile fire and one in a traffic accident.
One soldier from Task Force Olympia, based in northern Iraq, died yesterday following an attack on his patrol, US command said in a statement. It did not say when the attack took place.
The Dutch Ministry of Defence confirmed that a Dutch soldier was killed and another wounded in an attack last night in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah, the Japanese national news agency Kyodo reported. They were the first casualties reported among the 1,300 Dutch troops participating in the coalition in Iraq.
Kyodo, citing local Iraqi security officials, said someone in a passing car hurled a grenade-like object at a patrol of Dutch soldiers on a bridge over the Euphrates River. In recent weeks, mortars have been fired at the base camps for Dutch and Japanese troops in Samawah without causing any casualties.
Also in southern Iraq, firefighters were still battling a blaze that erupted on Saturday after insurgents bombed a pipeline carrying oil for export to a terminal south of the southern city of Basra.
Jabber Luyaibi, director general of Iraq’s Southern Oil Company, said engineers managed to divert oil to a second pipeline.
But an official for the State Oil Marketing Pipeline told Dow Jones Newswires that the alternative pipeline was too small to handle the additional flow and that, as a result, Iraq’s petroleum exports fell by 25% to 1.2 million barrels a day.
Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven petroleum reserves after Saudi Arabia, and its return to world oil markets is the key to reviving the economy after decades of war and misrule by Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime.
In London, Paul Horsnell, head of energy research at Barclays Capital, said the damage could be repaired quickly and that the disruption of exports would be temporary. But he said the attack was disturbing because “quite clearly, now the southern infrastructure is a target”.
Southern Iraq, homeland of the country’s Shiite Muslim community, had been relatively quiet compared with the turbulent central and north-central regions, where Sunni Muslim insurgents have been attacking US forces for months.
But security in the south has deteriorated since US and coalition forces launched a crackdown last month on al-Sadr, the young Shiite extremist, and his al-Mahdi Army militia. Al-Sadr is sought for his alleged role in the murder last year of a moderate, rival cleric in Najaf in April 2003.
In Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, US tanks and armoured vehicles traded gunfire with al-Sadr’s militiamen for around two hours yesterday near the al-Mokhayam mosque, according to residents.
The skirmish tapered off by the afternoon, but the intermittent crackle of heavy machine gun fire could be heard in the area, and al-Sadr’s fighters remained outside the mosque. A doctor at Karbala’s main hospital said three fighters were wounded.
Elsewhere, a previously unknown group warned foreigners yesterday in Basra, the major city of southern Iraq, that they will be targeted for kidnapping and assassination. The message – directed at Americans, Britons and Kuwaitis – was made in a videotape from the Al-Taff Martyrs Brigade broadcast by Al-Jazeera television.
The statement was read by a masked man flanked by armed men, their faces also covered.