Blaze Cuts Off Iraq Oil Flow to North

Two ferocious blazes raged out of control Sunday along the pipeline that exports Iraq’s oil to the north, and saboteurs blew a hole in a giant Baghdad water main, forcing engineers to cut off water to the capital and complicating efforts to bring stability to war-torn Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Danish army reported one of its soldiers died from a gunshot after stopping a truck of Iraqis on Saturday near Basra in southern Iraq. The soldier was the first Dane killed since Denmark sent about 400 soldiers this summer to join the stabilization force around Basra.

Two Iraqis died in the shootout, one was wounded and six were arrested, the Danish army command said in Denmark.

The fires on the 600-mile pipeline stretching from northern Kirkuk to Turkey, 125 miles northeast of Baghdad, were within miles of each other. The first began Friday, only two days after oil exports to Turkey resumed, and the second happened Saturday night.

Iraqi officials blamed the first blaze on saboteurs. Police Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, the new Iraqi police commander, vowed to pursue “a group of conspirators who received money from a particular party” to blow up the pipeline. Acting Iraqi oil minister Thamer al-Ghadaban also blamed sabotage.

But U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. William MacDonald, of the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit, said Sunday that “until it’s cooled off, nobody can say exactly what happened.”

Iraqi firefighters at the scene of the second blaze watched helplessly as smoke billowed a quarter-mile in the air. They held off on calling it sabotage, but said it was certainly suspicious.

Supervisor Abdul Khaliq Akrum Fatah said for two fires to break out in such a short stretch of pipeline “is unheard of and very mysterious.”

He said American soldiers had been notified, but that there was little anyone could do.

“They have already closed the pipeline, so all we can do is wait for the remaining oil to burn,” he said.

Al-Ghadaban said it would take several days to get the export pipeline working again.

The crumbling network of pipe began pumping oil to Turkey on Wednesday, but the first explosion early Friday cut it off completely, al-Ghadaban said.

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, said the country was losing $7 million a day with the pipeline out of operation.

Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven crude reserves, at 112 billion barrels, but its pipelines, pumping stations and oil reservoirs are dilapidated after more than a decade of neglect. Northern Iraq, site of the giant Kirkuk oil fields, accounts for 40 percent of Iraq’s oil production.

In northern Baghdad, an explosion blew a gaping hole in a water main with a 5 1/4-foot diameter early Sunday, flooding streets and forcing engineers to cut off water to all of Baghdad.

Witnesses said they saw two men on a motorbike leaving a bag of explosives and detonating it minutes later.

“It was an act of sabotage,” said Majid Noufel, an engineer with the Baghdad water company. “We’ve had to stop pumping water to the whole city so we can fix the damage.”

U.S. military spokesman Spc. Anthony Reinoso said someone fired two mortar rounds at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison Saturday night, killing three Iraqis and wounding 61. He didn’t know whether the casualties were guards or prisoners, or who was behind the attack.

Two U.S. soldiers were shot Saturday coming out of a Baghdad restaurant but were able to drive themselves to a medical facility for treatment. Reinoso had no further details.

An American soldier was wounded by shrapnel Saturday when a patrol of Abrams tanks, armored personnel carriers and Humvees was ambushed near Baqouba, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad.

The attackers detonated a roadside bomb made of four 155mm artillery shells, then opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, said Capt. Jon Casey of the 4th Infantry Division, who was on the patrol.

“We engaged them with our own automatic weapons and called in helicopter support,” he said. “We had no further contact and secured the area.”

Further north in Mosul, the police chief survived an assassination attempt, taking two bullets to the leg, the U.S. military reported. Two people, apparently bodyguards, were killed and 14 were wounded, said spokesman Sgt. Danny Martin.

“It was an ambush at an intersection,” Martin said.

—

EDITOR’S NOTE – Associated Press Writers Andrew England in Baqouba and Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad contributed to this report.