Iraq plans to defend oil installations

IRAQ’s deputy oil minister warned yesterday that Iraq would take up arms to protect its oil wealth and predicted that a US-led invasion could push oil to $70 a barrel.

Taking journalists on a tour of the al-Doura oil refinery in Baghdad, Deputy Oil Minister Hussein al-Hadithi said Iraq would not set fire to its oil installations, as some have feared, but rather would defend them.

“We have plans to defend these sites with arms. We have an organised defensive force,” he said.

“We will continue production to supply international markets with oil.”

But he cautioned that the price of oil, which came within a penny of $40 a barrel last week, could rise even more, to between $50 and $70 a barrel. Analysts have blamed the rise in part on war fears.

Al-Doura is a major oil refinery, whose tall smokestack and plume of fire is a Baghdad landmark.

It was bombed during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and again during the 1991 Gulf War.

This time, several dozen self-described “human shields” are scattered around the installation in an attempt to save the refinery from attack.

“We are staying here because we think this war is unjust,” said Faith Fippinger, a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher from Sarasota, Florida.

UN weapons inspectors yesterday visited a former helicopter airfield called al-Aziziya, 60 miles south-east of Baghdad, where Iraq has been unearthing 157 R-400 aerial bombs filled with anthrax, aflatoxin and botulin toxin that it says it destroyed there in 1991.