BAGHDAD: Militants have attacked a high voltage power line serving several Iraqi provinces for the eighth time in two months, the government said on Sunday.

The Electricity Ministry said it had to once again repair the 400 kilovolt line between Kirkuk and Diyala after “terrorist attacks of sabotage... which caused the line to cut” on Thursday.

The damage was “the eighth attack on this line in two months,” the ministry said in a statement, plunging Kirkuk, Salaheddin and Nineveh provinces into darkness.

Prime Minister Haider Abadi declared “victory” in the fight against Daesh in December, after the militants had seized nearly a third of the country’s territory in 2014.

But Daesh pockets remain, including in the mountains around Kirkuk.

The damage to the line between Kirkuk and Diyala has now been repaired and power restored to residents, a source in the ministry told AFP on Sunday.

Iraq is grappling with severe power cuts, due mainly to a dilapidated grid infrastructure that has suffered years of neglect.

The shortages have fed into protests over the last month, as residents contend with summer heat reaching 50 degrees Celsius.

Abadi fired Electricity Minister Qasim Al-Fahdawi on July 29 in a bid to quell the protests, which originated in Basra in the oil-rich south and spread to several other cities including Baghdad.



Separately on Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara is again to open a consulate in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, four years after it was seized and its employees held hostage by Daesh terrorists.

Ankara had opened a well-staffed consulate in Mosul, in a sign of Turkey’s ambitions in northern Iraq, before the rise of Daesh there and in neighboring Syria.

But 46 Turks, including diplomats, their children, special forces officers and other Turkish employees were taken hostage by the militants in June 2014. The hostages were freed in September 2014 after a three-month ordeal.

Symbolically, the consulate building was destroyed in a US-led coalition airstrike in April 2016 carried out in coordination with Ankara. The city was retaken by Iraqi forces in June 2017.

“The consulates general in Mosul and of Basra will resume operations within 100 days,” Erdogan told a meeting on government plans after his June 24 election victory.