| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq-Jordan |
| Gunmen kidnap 22 Iraqi soldiers |
| 2005-06-09 |
| Gunmen have kidnapped 22 Iraqi soldiers shortly after they left their base in western Iraq, a police official said on Wednesday. Meanwhile, saboteurs blew up a main oil pipeline in northern Iraq amid reports that eight people including five Iraqi civilians and three US soldiers were killed in fresh violence. The soldiers were abducted on Tuesday on the road from Qaim, near the Syrian border, to the town of Rawa, said Shaker Saleh, chief of police of Anbar province. He said the soldiers were Shia from southern Iraq. A car bomb that targeted a long row of cars queuing outside an Iraqi petrol station killed at least three civilians and injured another in the city of Baquba on Wednesday, police said. "We found three civilians' bodies torn completely apart," said Lieutenant-Colonel Thair al-Izzi. Eyewitnesses said no security force personnel — frequent targets of insurgent attacks — had been near the car at the time of the blast, 65 km north of Baghdad. . Gunmen killed two bodyguards of an official who is a member of the committee drafting Iraq's constitution in an attack on their car on Wednesday, an Interior Ministry official said. The bodyguards of Freydoun Abdel Qadir, a member of the National Assembly, were driving on a Baghdad highway when they were attacked. Qadir was not in the vehicle. Three US soldiers were killed in two attacks by insurgents in Iraq late on Tuesday, the US military said. A mortar attack on a base at Tikrit killed two soldiers of the 42nd Infantry Division, the military said in a statement on Wednesday. A soldier from the 1st Corps Support Command was killed when a roadside bomb blasted his vehicle. Saboteurs blew up a main oil pipeline in northern Iraq early on Wednesday, an official at the Northern Oil company said. A Reuters correspondent at the scene, just north of the refining town of Baiji, said smoke was pouring into the sky. Firecrews and US military personnel were in attendance. The Northern Oil official said the line affected was used to export oil to Turkey from Iraq's vast northern oil fields around Kirkuk. The company official said there had been no exports at the time because of repeated attacks. "This isn't the first time. They've targeted oil for a long time even when there is no exporting," he said on condition of anonymity. A shipping source said exports from the Ceyhan oil terminal at the Turkish end of Iraq's export pipeline, which currently holds 3.6 million barrels in storage tanks, had resumed on Tuesday. He said he did not know how long the flow would continue. "From previous experience we know that they pump for 24 or 48 hours and then they stop," he added. |
| Posted by:Fred |