BAGHDAD, Aug 1: Saboteurs blew up a key oil pipeline in northern Iraq, clashes left four Iraqis dead and three US soldiers lightly wounded and yet another tape purporting to be from former president Saddam Hussein popped up on Arab television on Friday.
Polish troops joining the US-led forces’ also received a baptism of fire when five mortar bombs were launched at their base in Hilla, south of Baghdad, with the attacks coming three months to the day since US President George Bush declared the war effectively over.
The pipeline fire in the northern refinery hub of Baiji was certain to throw off US plans to further resuscitate Iraq’s massive but crippled energy sector.
Only a day earlier, US officials had hailed the expected reopening later 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.
Oil exports are supposed to provide the financial muscle needed to foot the massive bill for Iraqi reconstruction expected to run to tens of billions of dollars per year.
Fighters suspected of being Saddam loyalists again clashed with US troops in the Fallujah area amid an escalation of anti-US attacks in the region west of Baghdad, seen as a haven of Saddam supporters.
Four Iraqi men were killed when they assaulted a US military convoy with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), Sergeant Keith O’Donnell said at a US base in Ramadi, near Fallujah where US troops come under daily attack.
“It was one of eight attacks in the last 24 hours west of Baghdad, the most extensive attacks in a while,” Sergeant O’Donnell said.
In a separate incident, three US soldiers were lightly wounded when their vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive device near a US base, the sergeant said.
HUNT FOR SADDAM: As the assaults on US forces continued unabated, so did the hunt for Iraq’s most-wanted man.
Finding Saddam Hussein is clearly a top priority for the United States, which has handed out retouched photographs showing the ousted strongman without a moustache, with a beard and in other possible guises.
The photos were the latest indication of an increasingly concentrated search for the Iraqi leader, who US intelligence sources assume has tried to change his appearance to escape capture after four months on the run.
The elusive former president has purportedly delivered a new message to the Iraqi people, with a voice said to be his popping up on the Al Jazeera TV on Friday.
In the audiotape supposedly recorded on July 27, the speaker called on Iraqis to safeguard the properties of the state and the Baath party until “things return to normal”, and spoke of the need to “salvage” Iraqis who have strayed from the right path.
While declaring that only resistance would end the US occupation of Iraq, the speaker said Iraqis should treat any foreign troops that “surrender” in accordance with international law and the tenets of Islam.
The message, the sixth since his government collapsed on April 9, comes amid confirmation that two of his daughters, Raghad and Rana, and their nine children arrived in Amman from Syria on Thursday and were being given Jordanian protection.
SHIA LEADER: And a young incendiary religious leader, Moqtada Sadr, launched another barb against the Americans as he seeks to wrest the mantle of leadership of the country’s Shias.
In his Friday sermon, Moqtada Sadr took the US troops to task over heavyhanded tactics in their sweeps.
Speaking to a gathering of around 100,000 faithful, the religious leader asked: “Must we accept that Iraqis are humiliated and dragged helplessly along the ground by these soldiers? We demand that they be judged according to the Shariat.”
JAFARI: The new head of Iraq’s Governing Council, Ibrahim Jafari, said on Friday he would work to end the occupation of his country and set the foundations of a democratic government.
In an interview with Egypt’s Sawt al Arab radio, Mr Jafari said he would do “everything possible to make political progress in order to end the occupation and set the foundations of freedom and democracy and deal with (Iraq’s) social and economic” woes.
Mr Jafari called on all Arabs to “participate in the rebuilding of a new Iraq and to eliminate every trace of the former regime, which is the source of all the tragedies that struck the Iraqi people”.
The US-sponsored 25-member Governing Council on Wednesday named Jafari as its first president in a nine-man monthly rotation. The council is a transitional executive body that is to pave the way for elections, which are at least one year away. —AFP