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," al-Khashab said.
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.
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