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Iraq's oil pipelines under attack
Resistance
forces repeatedly hitting vulnerable spots; cost to rebuild rises
Charles M. Sennott, Boston
Globe
Friday, November 28, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle |
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URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/28/MNGQE3C75I1.DTL
Kirkuk, Iraq -- Three successive explosions rattled the
windows at the Northern Oil Co. on a recent afternoon. Within minutes, several
U.S. contractors and Iraqi executives rushed out to start assessing the damage
from yet another attack on Iraq's oil pipelines.
Insurgents have been striking almost weekly against a labyrinth of pumping
stations and hundreds of miles of pipeline that snakes through the desolate
plains and rugged hills of northern Iraq, bearing crude oil exports to the
Turkish port city of Ceyhan. The attacks have all but shut down the flow of
850,000 barrels of exported crude that coursed through Kirkuk's hub of
pipelines each day before the war, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.
Describing the vulnerability of the pipeline, one insurgent, Ali, a 32-
year-old former Iraqi army sergeant turned resistance fighter, recently put it
this way: "The truth is, there is very little they can do to stop us. We can
hit them every day if we want to."
The sabotage also has robbed the U.S.-led occupation of revenues that it
hoped would defray the vast cost of rebuilding postwar Iraq. As if to
highlight the campaign against the petroleum industry, insurgents fired
rockets at the Oil Ministry in Baghdad last week from a donkey cart.
Washington's reconstruction strategy counts on an expected $50 billion in
oil export revenue for Iraq over the next three years, but the sabotage,
combined with extensive damage to infrastructure from neglect and looting,
means the earnings are likely to fall far short of U.S. predictions.
The pipelines are the focal point of a dangerous cops-and-robbers drama
involving anti-U.S. insurgents and the U.S. and Iraqi forces trying to hunt
them down.
Ali, the former soldier, who said he was a demolition specialist in the
Iraqi army, said that he had been training insurgents to prepare explosive
devices to sabotage the pipeline -- and that his group had bombed it 25 to 30
times. In an interview on the terrace of an apartment building in the northern
town of Ba'iji, as the gas-burnoff flame of an oil refinery flickered far in
the distance, Ali said he was part of a broad-based resistance effort against
the U.S.-led occupation.
Speaking on condition that his full name not be used, Ali said: "This is
Iraqi oil for the Iraqi people. America came, saying that it would kick out
Saddam, but they never got Saddam and instead began stealing our oil. So this
is why we are fighting, and this is why we will hit directly at what they want
most -- our oil."
Ali, his face covered in a red-and-white checkered kaffiyeh, said the ranks
of the resistance increasingly included former soldiers who, like himself,
profess no loyalty to Hussein but who are frustrated with the occupation and
determined to fight it.
He said he was part of a small group acting independently around Ba'iji,
which sits halfway between the vast oil fields of northern Iraq and the large
refineries in Baghdad. He said the groups were often aided by members of the
Bedouin tribes that live in the remote areas where the pipeline is most
vulnerable.
"We watch for spots where they are lacking security. We have also watched
which spots they repair, and then we strike that same spot again. This is all
very simple. They can never protect the pipeline," Ali said, smiling.
Chasing such shadowy suspects is far from easy.
"We have a serious problem here," said Manna al-Ubeidi, deputy director of
the Northern Oil Co. "The incidents have deeply affected exports, and that is
money that should be going to a national fund that would pay for
reconstruction. So this isn't just about a fire on a section of pipeline, it's
about the future of Iraq."
"As you can see, to respond to the incidents takes up a lot of our time,"
Ubeidi said as his boss, the director Adel Kazaz, hurried down a hallway
accompanied by U.S. soldiers and employees of Kellogg, Brown & Root, a
subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., which was awarded multibillion-dollar
contracts by the U.S.-led occupation to rebuild Iraq's crumbling and neglected
infrastructure.
A short time later, a section of the pipeline on the western outskirts of
Kirkuk could be seen blazing with an intense rolling fire. Several U.S.
soldiers stood outside their armored Humvee, pointing in the direction of the
fire and speaking on radios. One Iraqi official said there had been four to
five attacks per month since the occupation began seven months ago.
Beneath Kirkuk lies the second-largest oil reserve in Iraq, a vast field of
crude that has traditionally provided 40 percent of total exports. And on the
landscape outside the city, the huge cylindrical holding tanks sit like
precious eggs, connected to glistening chrome veins of 4-foot-wide pipe.
The Americans and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps have been policing the
pipelines and pursuing saboteurs. First Lieutenant Ted Ruzika of the 101st
Airborne Division was just coming off a shift of policing the pipeline in
northern Iraq near Hatra.
Ruzika, 25, said his unit guards a 40-mile stretch of the pipeline, which
is made up of three systems of piping, each up to 46 inches in diameter. Each
pipe carries a different oil product, and the smallest of the three lines
pumps liquid gas north to Turkey.
"What we try to do is just have a presence all the time," he said.
Ruzika said his brigade had been assisted by the Iraqi Facilities Force,
which is dedicated to protecting Iraq's infrastructure, and what they call
"the sheikh force." These, he explained, are about 40 to 50 members of local
tribes; the name refers to their leaders, or sheikhs. Ruzika said this militia
had helped U.S. forces protect the pipeline and alert them to any suspicious
activity in the area.
"If you can keep the locals on your side, you can have a lot more success,
" he said.
Iraqi oil officials say the insurgents have recently been targeting a vast
network of thousands of miles of domestic pipelines that crisscross the center
of the country. This network provides the critical flow of oil and gas to the
Iraqi population and has kept the price of gasoline cheap. Gas is about 10
cents a gallon, less than the price of water.
If Iraq's domestic gas prices were to rise as a result of sabotage, Iraqi
officials say, that could perhaps be more destabilizing than shutting down
exports.
Asim Jihad, spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry, said the loss of these
exports to sabotage, combined with damage to the infrastructure through
looting amid the postwar chaos, left Iraq's oil industry in October able to
export only 1.14 million barrels of crude per day, worth about $24 million.
That figure is less than half of the up to 2.5 million barrels per day that
Iraq was exporting before the war, he said.
"We have a lot of work to do," Jihad added. "We can focus on repairing the
infrastructure, but the truth is the sabotage operations are virtually
impossible to thwart."
©2003
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