Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 17 June 2004 — Fighters struck yesterday at the heart of Iraq’s economic livelihood, blasting a major pipeline, forcing a halt in the country’s critical oil exports and killing the security chief in charge of protecting the nation’s other major export avenue.

A rocket slammed yesterday into a US logistics base near Balad, 80 kilometers north of Baghdad, killing two US soldiers and wounding 26 people, including two civilian employees, the military said.

Elsewhere, Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr ordered members of his militia to leave the cities of Najaf and Kufa unless they live there, fulfilling a key aspect of an agreement meant to end fighting between his forces and US troops. An explosion about 2 a.m. yesterday damaged a pipeline carrying crude oil from Iraq’s southern fields to the Basra oil terminal in the Gulf, officials said. Iraqi engineers had diverted crude shipments to that pipeline after another was bombed two days ago.

“Due to the damage inflicted on the two pipelines, the pumping of oil to the Basra oil terminal has completely stopped,” Samir Jassim, spokesman of the state-owned Southern Oil Company, said. “Exports have come to a halt.”

Exports were halted last month through Iraq’s other export avenue — the northern pipeline from Kirkuk to Ceyhan, Turkey — after a May 25 bombing, Turkish officials said on condition of anonymity.

Gunmen killed the official in charge of protecting the northern oilfields, Ghazi Talabani, during an ambush yesterday while he was going to work in the city of Kirkuk. Gen. Anwar Amin of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps said three gunmen attacked Talabani’s car after his bodyguard briefly left the vehicle in a crowded market.

The bodyguard was wounded. Talabani was the third Iraqi official to be killed since Saturday. “What you are seeing here is effectively a terrorist war against Iraq’s critical infrastructure, including the oil infrastructure,” coalition spokesman Dan Senor told CNN. “It is an effort to basically, economically, impoverish the Iraqi people.”

President George W. Bush, in a speech beamed live to US forces around the globe, said democracy was being born in Iraq despite the killing of Iraqi officials and the attacks against pipelines.

“We have come not to conquer, but to liberate people and we will stand with them until their freedom is secure,” Bush told several thousand troops at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, home of the US Central Command. “By helping the rise of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the world, you are giving people an alternative to bitterness and hatred, and that is essential to the peace of the world.”

Iraqi officials said they hoped to repair the damage to the southern pipelines in a few days, and it was not going to have a substantial effect on world petroleum supplies. Sabotage and decrepit facilities have prevented Iraq from taking a leading role in global oil markets.

However, the economic and psychological effects in Iraq are more far-reaching, coming during an upsurge in violence ahead of the June 30 transfer of sovereignty.

The two southern pipelines together export about 1.7 million barrels a day, according to the Middle East Economic Survey. Each day that the southern lines are closed will cost Iraq about $50 million, said Walid Khadduri, an expert on Iraq’s oil industry.

Fighters have stepped up attacks in recent weeks against Iraqi industrial sites and against technicians who work there to undermine support for the new interim Iraqi government that takes power at the end of the week.

The attacks occurred as the US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq conflict, began talks with an interim Iraqi leadership eager to display its independence at a time when America’s image here is low.

Wolfowitz met yesterday with interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and others. Afterward, the coalition said the talks were “just the beginning of a new relationship between the government of Iraq and the members of the coalition.”