June 9, 2004
James Glanz NYT
BAGHDAD Coordinated sabotage attacks on fuel and transmission lines around an enormous power plant south of Baghdad shut the plant down last weekend, American and Iraqi government officials said Tuesday, raising new fears that insurgents were targeting major sectors of the Iraqi infrastructure as part of an overall terror plan.
At full production, the plant is capable of supplying nearly 20 percent of the entire electrical output of Iraq. But the plant's output plunged nearly to zero and was still generating only a fraction of its maximum output, said Raad Al Haris, deputy minister for electricity.
An official with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which is scheduled to hand over sovereignty in the country to a new Iraqi government on June 30, confirmed that an oil pipeline south of Baghdad had been struck by sabotage. A second senior official in the Electricity Ministry said that the weekend attack had been the latest in a series in the same area, and that repairs on the lines had repeatedly been followed by new strikes. This official said that the pipeline also delivered crude oil to at least one major refinery, whose operations had also been affected.
By Tuesday, enough repairs had been done to increase the plant's output to about 300 megawatts of electricity, out of a possible 750 megawatts, for most of the day, the official said. Power plants around the country put about 4,000 megawatts on the electrical grid, although demand is much higher, which leads to frequent blackouts, both scheduled and unscheduled. Demand is expected to soar even higher as the hot summer months arrive.
"As we have been saying for some time, international terrorists and Saddam loyalists continue to try to derail the emergence of a modern democratic Iraq," said Dallas Lawrence, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority on electricity, in a statement.
More worrisome than this specific act of sabotage, Haris said, is the pattern of attacks on the electrical grid around the country. He estimated that the high-tension lines that are the backbone of the grid have been attacked an average of twice a week recently, and he expressed irritation at what he said had been a refusal by the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide security for the lines.
The provisional authority official who confirmed the weekend attack said that the authority was helping to train thousands of electricity ministry guards on how to protect the lines, and that no force would be able to provide 24-hour-a-day security for the more than 10 thousand miles of major power lines in Iraq.
The electrical turbines, power lines and other equipment at the plant south of Baghdad have been the focus of major reconstruction work as part of the rebuilding of the country, largely financed by billions of dollars of American money and revenues from Iraq's oil fields.
Even before the weekend strike, the area around the plant had been the scene of violence, including a drive-by shooting that killed two European engineers and a bomb attack on a police station.
A senior United States military intelligence official said that insurgents in Iraq had begun to realize that, with summer coming on, damaging the country's electrical and water infrastructure could sow widespread distrust and discontent with the occupation and its allies, including the new Iraqi government.
"This is a very big priority for them right now," said Ray Salvatore Jennings, country representative in Iraq for the United States Institute of Peace, who meets frequently with officials at the provisional authority. Speaking of authority officials' concerns on infrastructure, he added that "they see this insurgency getting very sophisticated about targeting this to delegitimize the new regime."
Saad Shakir Tawfiq, an engineer who worked on the rehabilitation of the grid in 1991 and now leads a government-owned center in the Iraqi Ministry of Industry that is doing some work at several power plants, said that the effort aimed "to distract the American-backed government."
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