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Sabotage of oil pipeline dents US plans for Iraq

Firemen call for more water while battling a blazing oil pipeline near the refinery town of Baiji in northern Iraq yesterday. PHOTO: REUTERS

Saboteurs blew up a key oil pipeline in northern Iraq, as former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's eldest daughter, Raghad, accused his aides of "betraying" the deposed Iraqi president and causing the fall of Baghdad.

The charges came as the CIA said the latest audiotape purportedly made by Saddam and aired Friday by Al-Jazeera was likely authentic.

"The CIA has concluded after a technical analysis of the voice that there is a high likelihood it is that of Saddam," said an agency official.

In the tape, Saddam calls on Iraqis to safeguard properties of the state and his Baath party until "things return to normal" and spoke of the need to "salvage" Iraqis who have "strayed."

The pipeline fire in the northern refinery hub of Baiji, still raging late Friday, was certain to throw off US plans to further resuscitate Iraq's massive but crippled energy sector.

Only a day earlier, US officials hailed the expected reopening early this month of the country's main oil pipeline from the petroleum centre of Kirkuk to the Turkish Mediterranean terminal of Ceyhan, wrecked in a previous sabotage attack.

The US Central Command yesterday released these digitally enhanced photographs of what former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein might look like. PHOTO: REUTERS

Oil exports are supposed to go toward paying the massive bill for Iraqi reconstruction, expected to run to tens of billions of dollars per year.

Suspected former regime loyalists in the Fallujah area again clashed with US troops amid an escalation of anti-US violence in the region west of Baghdad seen as a haven of Saddam supporters.

Four Iraqi men were killed when they attacked a US military convoy with rocket-propelled grenades, Sergeant Keith O'Donnell said at a US base in Ramadi, near Fallujah, where US troops come under fire almost daily.

"It was one of eight attacks in the last 24 hours west of Baghdad, the most extensive attacks in a while," O'Donnell said.

As the assaults on US forces continued unabated, so did the hunt for Iraq's most-wanted man.

Finding Saddam is clearly a top priority for the US, which has handed out retouched photographs showing the ousted strongman in several possible changes of appearance.

The photos were the latest indication of an increasingly concentrated search for Saddam, who US intelligence sources assume has tried to change his appearance to escape capture after four months on the run.

Washington, which says it has already paid US$30 million to the Iraqi who fingered Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay, is offering a US$25 million reward for Saddam himself, dead or alive.

The ousted dictator's daughter Raghad said the betrayal came from the people whom Saddam trusted fully.

"They betrayed their country before betraying Saddam Hussein," she told the Dubai-based al-Arabiya satellite news channel in Amman.

Raghad, who arrived in the Jordanian capital with her sister Rana and their nine children on Thursday after being granted refuge, termed the sudden fall of Baghdad on April 9 "a great shock."
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