BAGHDAD, Oct 23: Four sabotage blasts have brought oil exports from northern Iraq to a halt and repairs could take up to one month to carry out, an oil official said on Sunday.

“The exports to Ceyhan (Turkey) have stopped completely because of four blasts that hit a main gathering centre for at least four fields,” the official told Reuters.

He said that oil from Kirkuk, Janbour, Bay Hassan, Khabaz and other northern fields were gathered at the centre.

Meanwhile, in the south of Iraq, high seas and thick dust have halted oil loadings from Iraq’s main Basra terminal since Friday, a shipping source said.

Seven oil tankers are anchored waiting to load. It was not clear how long the delays would last in the port which was shipping 84,000 barrels per hour before the bad weather began, the source said.

“There is no sailing or loading, we don’t know when the weather will be better,” the source said.

Iraq has relied on its Basra Oil Terminal to ship crude since the US-led invasion in March 2003, as repeated sabotage along the northern Iraq-Turkey pipeline has kept that export route mostly idle.

The northern pipeline only recently resumed exports to Turkey’s Ceyhan port after repairs following sabotage.

But on Thursday, a bomb attack on a secondary oil pipeline that feeds the route to Turkey cut exports by 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 600,000 bpd.

The pipeline, which was designed to carry more than 1.5 million bpd, has been closed for most of the post-invasion era.

It runs through Sunni areas hostile to American forces and the US-backed government.

The flows to a storage facility on the border had increased from 200,000 to 700,000 bpd in the last week.—Reuters