Sabotage plagues efforts to restore oil industry

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- When guards at an oil refinery seized a group of intruders last weekend, they thought they had snared thieves.

A search, however, turned up more than 80 containers of explosives, suggesting a planned attack that could have crippled the facility and disrupted energy supplies to millions of people in the Iraqi capital.

Fixing Iraq's ruined economy depends on oil production. Exports of crude generate money needed to pay for the country's reconstruction. Domestic stability depends in part on Iraqis having adequate supplies of refined products such as cooking gas and gasoline.

But sabotage has plagued efforts to restore oil output to prewar levels. Since the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein, attackers have fired mortars, sprayed bullets and planted explosives that have damaged pipelines and other oil facilities, particularly in the area stretching north from Baghdad to the predominantly Kurdish areas near Iraq's border with Turkey.

Officials at Baghdad's Doura refinery told the Associated Press that four intruders were preparing two tons of explosives for an attack on the refinery's fuel depot or the boilers that help power the plant. A successful strike could have knocked out half of Doura's production for at least a year, said the facility's general manager, Dathar al-Khashab.

"This is the most dangerous incident that has happened at Doura for as long as I can remember," said al-Khashab, who has worked at the refinery since 1968. He said he suspects those planning the attack planned it to coincide with Sunday's bombing that killed 31 people outside coalition headquarters in Baghdad.

Series of attacks

A series of attacks months ago forced authorities to shut down the export pipeline built to carry crude from northern Iraq to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The pipeline's continued closure has constrained oil production at northern oil fields and left the country with a single export route, a southern pipeline to the Persian Gulf.

The discovery of a bomb at a pipeline leading to a refinery in Beiji, 125 miles north of Baghdad, forced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Tuesday to halt repairs on a corroded section of the pipe. Most oil-related attacks have occurred within 30 miles of Beiji, said Robert McKee, oil adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The number of attacks peaked at 16 in October and dropped to four last month -- a decline that accompanied deployment of the first of some 14,000 oil industry guards.

"It's a very heavy physical presence with an Iraqi face," said the project's commander, Army Col. Tom O'Donnell.

A British security firm, Erinys International Ltd., is training the guards and expects to complete the deployment by the end of next month.

"Security has been improved gradually with time. There is now a definite decrease in incidents all over Iraq," said Oil Ministry adviser Thamir al-Ghadban.

Last autumn, saboteurs fired mortars and machine guns nightly at an oil depot in the town of Latifiyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad. The attacks prevented the depot from operating for over 10 hours a day. After Erinys hired hundreds of guards from three villages in the area, the number of attacks there dwindled to zero, and the depot is now open around the clock, O'Donnell said.

"I asked, 'Why do you think there haven't been any attacks in the past few weeks.' And the guards told me -- this is no lie -- 'Because I live there. They're not going to shoot me,"' he said.

Politically motivated insurgents, many of whom are believed to be foreigners, present a tougher challenge, and some Iraqi oil officials advocate using force to subdue them. Two of the four would-be saboteurs at the Doura refinery spoke with Egyptian accents, security guards said.

Doura, with a refining capacity of 110,000 barrels of oil a day, offers insurgents a juicy target. The refinery produces much of the gasoline, heating oil and cooking gas that has been scarce in the Iraqi capital since Saddam's ouster last April. It also distributes crude oil used as fuel by two of the capital's four electric plants.

Doura and the authority headquarters are "the hottest spots in Baghdad" for a terrorist attack, said refinery chief al-Khashab. "It would have had a tremendous psychological impact if these two (the refinery and the bomb near the occupation headquarters) had gone up at the same time."

Security guards and police at Doura caught three men Saturday trying to flee across a scrub-covered field next to the refinery. A fourth intruder escaped but was captured the next day.

When a search of the field turned up canisters of explosives camouflaged by sticks and dead grass, they realized that these ordinary-looking strangers posed an extraordinary threat. The cache was four times the size of the charge that blew up outside coalition headquarters.

Officials believe the intruders had concealed the munitions and planned to load them on a vehicle and sneak them into the refinery complex. The attack might have succeeded, if not for vigilant guards in a watch tower built just six weeks before.