Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline fire extinguished after attack

Firefighters in southeastern Turkey on Saturday put out a fire on a pipeline carrying about a quarter of Iraq's oil exports, but it was unclear when oil would resume flowing, Turkish security sources said. The sources blamed sabotage by Kurdish separatists for the explosion on the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. The fire broke out in the early afternoon on Friday near the town of Midyat in Mardin province, near the Syrian border. Officials blamed the attack on the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist group that has claimed responsibility for past attacks on the 960-kilometer (600-mile) pipeline. Meanwhile Firat News, a website with ties to the terrorist group, also said the PKK was behind the attack. Insurgents in Iraq have in the past disrupted the transport of oil on the pipeline, the country's largest, and technical faults on the 35-year-old link, which consists of two pipes, have also cut flows. The last attack to target the pipeline occurred in April, when three near-simultaneous attacks were carried out on one of the two pipes in the Idil area of Turkey's Sirnak province, close to the border with Iraq. The terrorist PKK claimed responsibility for another other recent attack a Turkish stretch of the Baku-Tbilisi gas pipeline on May 29, when bombs rocked the Sarikamis district of Kars province, near the Armenian border. The attack also comes amid worsening tensions between Iraqi Kurdistan's regional government, which has signed a number of export deals independent of the central government, and Baghdad, which says that oil deals can only be signed by a federal authority. A recent deal with Turkey -- which has also seen strained ties with Baghdad over sheltering Iraq's fugitive Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi -- is the latest such move, and has seen the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) export an unspecified amount of crude oil by truck to Turkey without the permission of the central government. Turkey's Foreign Ministry has meanwhile confirmed that some of that crude is being refined and returned to the Kurdish region. Iraq's government in early July denounced crude-oil exports from the semi-autonomous northern region of Kurdistan to neighboring Turkey as "illegal" and threatened to take "appropriate action." Turkey has nevertheless signaled that Iraqi Kurdistan will become an increasingly key source of oil and natural gas in the future, with Energy Minister Taner Yildiz stating in May that "Iraq will have a significant contribution in meeting Turkey's natural gas demand." The total volume of proven natural gas reserves in Iraq is estimated at 3.17 trillion cubic meters as of the beginning of this year. The Turkish government has also raised the possibility of establishing an electricity production hub near the Iraqi border and may sell electricity to Iraq in exchange for natural gas. Officials from Iraqi Kurdistan's regional government have meanwhile suggested that another northern Iraq­-Turkey pipeline might connect to a refinery in Turkey's port of Ceyhan by 2014.