Iraq's oil guardians ill-trained and sometimes treacherous

[Barrett808]

KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) - A pillar of black smoke blocked a quarter of the sky, turning the spring sky outside Kirkuk overcast and hinting at yet another attack on the all-important pipeline to the refinery at Baiji.

But no one at the Strategic Infrastructure Brigade, whose job it is to protect the buried length of pipeline and whose local headquarters is no more than a kilometre (half a mile) away, had any idea what was going on.

Major Abdullah Hussein Saad, the SIB second battalion's executive officer, said that there had been reports of a leak the night before. Then, without any sound of an explosion, it had all caught fire this morning.

"No one saw anything," he told US soldiers visiting his base and inquiring about the massive fire. "It's hard to see anything; there's a lot of grass and people are constantly coming and going."

That did not impress Captain Ryan Peay, whose battalion of the 101st Airborne Division's 327th Artillery regiment is responsible for coordinating with the SIB.

"It was daylight, there was a leak and you had no one watching it," he asked with no small degree of incredulity.

(more)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060414/wl_mideast_afp/iraqusoilunrest

[NYC]

1. Two things:

...A lot of work remains to be done at the ramshackle headquarters of the SIB's second battalion, especially after the battalion commander was purged after he was discovered to be the head of the local insurgency.

While US army medics teach his men a combat first aid class, another officer, Major Saad, said motivating the men is difficult. A number of them haven't received their salaries in six months...

"People resent us. We are supposed to protect the pipeline, but the people around here have no fuel," he said, before asking Captain Peay for more gasoline for his own vehicles...

and

...As it turned out, the Northern Oil Company (NOC) had sealed the leak the night before and then burned off the massive pool of oil that had collected in the area -- without telling anyone...