Two GIs killed, 26 injured in rocket attack
Air and ground units responded to the attack, the military said. Balad is 50 miles north of Baghdad.
On June 6, a US soldier on the same base was killed and another wounded in a mortar attack. Camp Anaconda also suffered a mortar attack last July 4 that wounded 18 US soldiers.
Saboteurs blasted a key pipeline for the second time in as many days, shutting down Iraq's oil exports, and gunmen killed a security chief for the state-run Northern Oil Co.
The latest attacks at Iraq's oil sector have slowed the process of reviving its economy after decades of war, international sanctions and Saddam Hussein's tyranny. Insurgents also are targeting the country's infrastructure apparently to undermine confidence in the new government, which takes power from the US-led coalition June 30.
Elsewhere, radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered members of his militia to leave the holy 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.
Yesterday's attack north of the town of Faw crippled two already damaged pipelines, forcing authorities to stop the flow of crude oil southward to the Basra oil terminal on the Gulf, said Southern Oil Co spokesman Samir Jassim. In another assault on the country's petroleum industry, Northern Oil Co security chief Ghazi Talabani was killed in an ambush while going to work in the city of Kirkuk. The city sits on some of the world's largest oil reserves. The biggest northern oil field contains an estimated 7 billion barrels of recoverable crude, putting it in the same league as Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, during its heyday in the 1970s.
