BAGHDAD, 18 August 2003 — Taps ran dry in Baghdad and oil exports to Turkey ground to a halt after a wave of sabotage and violence hit Iraq yesterday. At least 10 people, including a Danish peacekeeper, were killed
Officials suspected saboteurs bent on slowing the country’s already stumbling recovery from decades of neglect by Saddam Hussein and weeks of bombing by the United States. A new group of resistance fighters said they would battle the US-led occupation no matter what it does.
The explosion in northern Baghdad blew a gaping hole in a water main with a 5 1/4-foot (1.6-meter) diameter early yesterday, 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.”
Residents, finding their taps dry, rushed to stock up on bottled water. Many stores ran out of stocks quickly.
Officials said they would have water restored sooner than that.
“Ordinarily it would take 36 hours to restore the water supply after a break of this sort, but the dedicated work of city employees means that I expect water to be restored by late this evening,” said Baghdad’s deputy mayor, Faris Abdul Razaq Al-Aasam.
Further north, two ferocious blazes raged out of control along the 950-km (600-mile) pipeline that exports Iraq’s oil to Turkey. The fires were within kilometers of each other, 200 km (125 miles) northeast of Baghdad.
The first began Friday, only two days after oil exports to Turkey resumed, and the second happened Saturday night. Both were attributed to sabotage.
Military spokesman Col. Guy Shields said it would take between 10 days and two weeks to fix the pipeline.
A new group of resistance fighters, the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance Movement, said in a videotaped aired on the Al-Jazeera television network that they would battle the occupying troops even if the US-led coalition helps Iraq recover from war. “This resistance is not a reaction to the American provocations against the Iraqi people or to the shortage of services, as some analysts believe... but to kick out the occupiers as a matter of principle,” a man read from a statement.
The US military said six Iraqis were killed and 59 wounded in a mortar bomb attack on the US-guarded Abu Ghraib prison on the western outskirts of the capital on Saturday night.
A Reuters photographer, who had gone to cover the incident, was also shot dead. The circumstances surrounding his death were unclear.
In southern Iraq, where rampant looting of copper electricity cables has caused widespread blackouts and slashed oil output, a Danish soldier was killed on Saturday evening in a gunbattle with thieves who had been stealing power lines.
Maj. Ian Poole, spokesman for the British military in Basra, said two of the Iraqi looters were also killed in the battle and the remaining six were arrested.
Also on Saturday, two US soldiers were shot coming out of a Baghdad restaurant, but were able to drive themselves to a medical facility for treatment.
A delegation of the Iraqi interim authority, meanwhile, arrived in Abu Dhabi on the first stop of a regional tour to drum up political support from fellow Arab countries.
