Iraq oil site ignited; U.S. plane goes down

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Mortar rounds crashed into an oil processing facility near the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, igniting a huge blaze, and a U.S. Air Force jet with one pilot crashed while supporting American soldiers fighting in Anbar province, a hotbed of Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgency.

The government fully lifted a curfew on Monday, allowing vehicles back on roads and reopening the international airport on the fourth day after suspected Sunni insurgents used bombs and mortars to kill more than 200 people in Sadr City, a large Shiite slum, in the worst attack by militants in the war. Sectarian violence continued across the country with a total of 91 people killed or found dead.

The fire at the pipeline filtering facility shut down the flow of crude to the massive Beiji refinery to the southwest, according to an official at the North Oil Co., who spoke on condition of anonymity. The flames erupted at 6:30 p.m. and burned for several hours before they were extinguished, the U.S. military said.

The facility is 15 miles northwest of Kirkuk, a city that sits amid some of Iraq’s richest crude oil deposits.

Earlier Monday, a bomb exploded beneath an oil pipeline south of Baghdad and set it on fire, and Iraqi and American forces were deployed to secure the area, police said.

No injuries were reported in the 7:30 a.m. blast near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, said police 1st Lt. Haider Satar. The fire was put out about noon. The pipeline carries crude oil from storage tanks in nearby Latifiyah to the Dora refinery in Baghdad.

Since the U.S.-led war toppled Saddam Hussein in March 2003, the country’s oil industry has suffered many such attacks on its pipelines.

The F-16CG jet that crashed was supporting coalition ground forces when it went down about 1:35 p.m. in Anbar province, 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, the military said in a brief statement. The statement had no information about the cause of the crash or fate of the pilot.

Al-Jazeera satellite television showed video of the wreckage in a field and what looked to be portions of a tangled parachute nearby.

The U.S. command also said three soldiers were killed and two wounded during combat operations in Baghdad on Sunday. At least 2,878 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.