Exports of crude oil from northern Iraq have been suspended after a new bomb attack against a key pipeline, an Iraqi person familiar with the matter and a Middle East shipping agent said Tuesday, the second such interruption in less than a week.
Exports of crude oil from northern Iraq have been suspended after a new
bomb attack against a key pipeline, an Iraqi person familiar with the matter
and a Middle East shipping agent said Tuesday, the second such interruption in
less than a week.
Iraq
normally exports an average of 300,000 to 350,000 barrels a day via the
pipeline, which carries crude from the
Kirkuk
oil
fields to the Turkish
port
of
Ceyhan
.
"The attackers blew up part of the pipeline using six bombs planted
underneath the line," a person familiar with the matter told Dow Jones
Newswires.
The attack took place around 1 a.m. local time Monday north of the al-Shurgat
area north of Baiji, some 200 kilometers north of the capital,
Baghdad
, he
said.
A
Middle East
shipping agent in the Mediterranean
port
of
Ceyhan
confirmed that the flow has been stopped since early Monday.
Last week the pipeline was cut in a similar location in order to smuggle the
crude. Flows resumed Friday after the damaged section was repaired. It may take
three days to repair the section of pipe that was destroyed in Monday's attack,
the Iraqi person said.
Shipping agents said they managed to pump some 2.6 million barrels of oil
between Friday and Monday before the new attack.
Three vessels are waiting in port in Ceyhan to load with
Kirkuk
crude, the shipping agent said.
The Iraq-Turkey pipeline has frequently suffered attacks, sometimes inside
Turkey
and
on other occasions inside
Iraq
. The
pipeline was idle for many years due to acts of sabotage after the U.S.-led
invasion in 2003.
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