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Pipeline is attacked { September 4 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/04/international/middleeast/04iraq.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/04/international/middleeast/04iraq.html
September 4, 2004
In Largely Quiet Iraq, Pipeline Is Attacked
By ALEX BERENSON
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 3 - An unusual quiet continued Friday for the second straight day in Iraq, with American forces and insurgents apparently taking a pause after months of heavy combat.
Still, some violence persisted. In northern Iraq, guerrillas blew up an oil pipeline, and the state-run oil company halted exports as firefighters battled the huge blaze.
Insurgents have repeatedly attacked oil pipelines and terminals since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government last year. Most of Iraq's oil production comes from fields in southern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border, which are estimated to have the second-largest deposits of oil in the world.
Last month, Shiite Muslim guerrillas loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr attacked the headquarters of Iraq's Southern Oil Company in Basra, temporarily disrupting production in the south and causing world oil prices to spike toward $50 per 42-gallon barrel. Pipelines in northern Iraq are generally more vulnerable and have repeatedly been attacked.
Meanwhile, the fate of two French journalists who have been held hostage for two weeks remained unclear on Friday as French government officials and Muslim clerics continued frantic efforts to obtain their release. On Thursday, two French clerics said they would travel to the Mother of All Battles mosque, a huge shrine in northwest Baghdad, to meet with a Sunni clerics association in an effort to persuade the kidnappers to release the men.
The journalists' fate has become a cause célèbre in France, which opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq and has refused to send its troops here despite more than a year of American appeals.
In videotapes released this week, the journalists said they could be killed at any time if the French government did not repeal its ban on head scarves for Muslim students. The ban is part of a larger prohibition on religious imagery for students of all faiths, but French Muslims have criticized it as an attack on their freedom of religion. France has said it will not repeal the ban.
So far this year, more than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped, along with hundreds of Iraqis.
Both religious and economic considerations appear to be driving the kidnappers, with some companies and governments reportedly paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to win the release of hostages. A cartoon in an Iraqi newspaper this week showed a masked man with an assault rifle standing behind another man wearing a shirt marked "TV" and looking through a camera. The thought bubble over the masked man's head showed a fat bag with a large "$" on it.
The French journalists are apparently being held by hard-core Sunni Muslim insurgents, which may complicate efforts to win their release. Sunni guerrillas in Falluja and western Iraq appear to be motivated mainly by anger at the United States, not money. They have repeatedly killed hostages, including some Iraqis they accuse of being collaborators, and have released video of beheadings on the Internet.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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