Incident Report

Subject:                         Bagdad Oil Explosion

Date of Email reporting Incident:   Sun 22/06/2003 17:48

Report Detail: Oil Pipeline Explodes West of Baghdad

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An oil pipeline exploded and caught fire west of Baghdad on Sunday, the U.S. military said, and flames were seen reaching high into the sky.  The cause of the explosion near the town of Hit, about 95 miles west of Baghdad, was being investigated, U.S. Military spokeswoman 1st Lt. Mary Pervez said. There were no U.S. casualties, she said. No other details were immediately available.

The explosion occurred on the same day Iraq was set to restart its first postwar oil exports. Tankers in recent days have been loading crude for export at storage facilities in the Turkish oil terminal Ceyhan. Iraq's oil pipeline from the northern fields of Kirkuk to Turkey's Ceyhan are expected to start pumping Sunday once the tankers start taking on crude, Mohammed Al-Jibouri, the head of Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization, or SOMO, told Dow Jones Newswires.

The pipeline stopped pumping during the U.S.-led war on Iraq, when shipping was stopped and the Ceyhan storage tanks filled to their capacity of 8 million barrels.

``Hopefully on Sunday when exports begin we will start pumping oil again,'' al-Jibouri said in an interview last week.  Full restart of Iraq's oil exports, around 2 million barrels a day before the war, have been delayed due to damage caused by saboteurs.