BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Rebels blew up a pipeline inside an oilfield in southern Iraq in the latest in a series of attacks on the country’s oil infrastructure that has cut exports from the key southern oil fields in half, officials said Saturday.

Saboteurs hit a pipeline late Friday that runs within the West Qurna oilfields, 90 miles north of the southern city of Basra, sending plumes of fire and smoke leaping into the air, said a South Oil Co. official in West Qurna, who asked not to be named.

The attack will effect exports, though it was not immediately clear by how much, the official said. The fires were extinguished by Saturday afternoon.

Separately, a domestic oil pipeline in Nahrawan, a desert region 20 miles east of Baghdad, was ablaze Saturday, Associated Press Television News footage showed.

Oil officials could not confirm if the pipeline fire was the result of sabotage. The pipeline transports oil to the Dora refinery near the capital.

Insurgents have repeatedly sabotaged Iraq’s crucial oil industry, its main source of income, in an effort to hamper reconstruction efforts here after years of war and devastating sanctions. The attacks have contributed to a steep rise in global oil prices.

Exports from Iraq’s oil-rich south have fallen to about 900,000 barrels a day, about half the normal average of 1.8 million barrels a day, after an attack Wednesday on a cluster of pipelines linked to the Rumeila oilfields, said Samir Jassim, an official from state-run South Oil Co.

“Repairing operations are still underway, and it will take more than one week to finish because a bridge has fallen on the pipelines,” Jassim said.

All the fires sparked by that attack in Berjasiya, 20 miles southwest of Basra, have now been put out, he said.

AP-ES-08-28-04 0948EDT



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