Sabotage Rising in Iraq - Reconstruction Official
Date: 08-Jul-03
Country: USA
Author: Charles Aldinger
"I'm certainly not expecting the ordinary Iraqi housewife or worker to go out there and fight off a saboteur," Andrew Bearpark told Pentagon reporters in a teleconference from Baghdad.
But "ordinary people can certainly pass on information," he added, noting that rewards had been offered for such reports as part of an effort to bring security to troubled Iraq, where U.S. and British troops are being killed in violent attacks.
Bearpark, who is British and serves as director of regional services in a reconstruction and stabilization effort headed by U.S. administrator Paul Bremer, said that while sabotage was increasing he sensed that most Iraqis were against it.
"We do see increasing sabotage over the last few weeks. I haven't seen any increase over the last few days," he told reporters.
Bearpark stressed that it was simply impossible for U.S. and allied troops to keep watch over the whole infrastructure along with inadequate numbers of Iraqi police and other local security forces to help.
"We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of miles of power cables, hundreds and hundreds of miles of pipelines and all of the associated facilities," he told reporters. "There just aren't enough tanks in the world to put one tank on every electricity pylon."
"I hope ... we will see a stronger reaction against sabotage," Bearpark added. "What I think we may now be seeing -- I don't want to be too optimistic too soon -- is that ordinary Iraqi people are seeing that this activity is actually directed at them, not at us."
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Carl Strock, an engineer and another senior official in the reconstruction effort, said that even single attacks against Iraq's decades-old, patchwork infrastructure of power and oil lines could be very effective.
"It is a very fragile system and does not have a lot of redundancy," he said. "So when it does get attacked it can have catastrophic impact."
The two also conceded that the electric power level in Baghdad was now lower than before the invasion of Iraq earlier this year because reconstruction officials were using improvements to the national grid to distribute more power to the rest of the country.
"Here in Baghdad, they typically enjoyed 23 to 24 hours of power" before the war, Strock told reporters. "But there are other places in the country that only got two."
"And as we have brought the system back on line, we have tried to get more equitable in the distribution of that power. So what you're seeing here is the people of Baghdad are receiving less than they did before, but about 80 percent of the population (of Iraq) is receiving more."
But Bearpark and Strock said progress was being made in the reconstruction effort, noting that Baghdad would be open to international commercial air traffic in about two weeks for the first time in more than a decade and that oil production was on the increase.
Strock said current oil production was about 800,000 barrels a day and reconstruction officials hoped to boost that to a million barrels a day by autumn and as much as 2.5 million daily within a year.
