4 September 2004
BAGHDAD - Two kidnapped French journalists remained captive in Iraq Friday, their whereabouts unknown, as Iraq’s fragile economy suffered the after-effects of a massive attack that crippled a key oil export pipeline to Turkey.
A huge fire blazed out of control on the vital northern pipeline for a second day, halting exports and forcing families to flee the area, according to police and Iraqi oil officials.
Saboteurs bombed on the strategic pipeline Wednesday near the town of Riyadah 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Kirkuk, Iraqi officials said, calling it the most serious attack on the north’s oil infrastructure since the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The state-run North Oil Company moved immediately to shut down the pipeline, which had been pumping at between 600,000 and 800,000 barrels per day, and was trying to control the blaze with sand barriers.
A French diplomat meanwhile said reporters Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, who were abducted on August 20, were “alive, in good health and being well treated,” although he could not say where they were being held.
Some sources said they were thought to be detained in Fallujah, and the girlfriend of one of them said a release was not imminent, further dampening expectations amid fears that fresh US military activity in the militant stronghold of Fallujah risked complicating negotiations.
However a source close to the insurgency told AFP the journalists were detained in Baghdad.
The diplomat’s report that the pair were still captive dispelled speculation that they had been transferred to another, more moderate militant group as a prelude to their release.
“There is hope and a great chance of a happy outcome,” said the diplomat, who declined to be named. “When will this happen? No one can tell. Maybe today, tomorrow or the day after that, but the situation in Iraq is such that it could take not much to scupper the whole process.”
An influential cleric from the Committee of Muslim Scholars said Chesnot and Malbrunot “are out of danger as was declared yesterday by Sheikh Hareth al-Dhari, their release could just be a matter of time.”
Yet Malbrunot’s girlfriend Sylvie Cherpin told reporters Friday night that the French Foreign Ministry had informed her a release could still take days.
“They’ve told me it’s not a matter of hours, but could take several days,” she said.
The kidnappers, from the Islamic Army in Iraq, which has claimed several beheadings of foreigners, had given France an ultimatum to lift a controversial new ban on the Islamic headscarf in state schools but it went into effect as planned on Thursday.
France has been frantically lobbying on behalf of the kidnapped journalists, with Foreign Minister Michel Barnier shuttling between Arab capitals.
Messages of solidarity continued to pour in, with Shiite radical leader Moqtada Sadr calling for their release in recognition of France’s anti-war stance through a sermon read by one of his aides.
Sadr had himself led an uprising against US-led troops last month, which ended with his announcement that he was turning his militia into a mainstream political movement.
But last-minute hitches had emerged in that transformation late Thursday with the breakdown of talks on a local deal for the militia’s Baghdad bastion of Sadr City.
“We have suspended the negotiations because the Iraqi government wasn’t serious in considering our demands,” one Sadr negotiator, Naim al-Qaabi, told AFP.
Meanwhile, violence once again engulfed the strife-ridden city of Fallujah when US forces fired artillery on an Iraqi military base late Friday, killing two soldiers and two civilians, according to an Iraqi soldier and doctors at the Fallujah General Hospital.
“We were inside the camp and we were able to see the Americans and they could see us. All of a sudden a US tank started to fire on us,” First Lieutenant Ahmed Khudair told AFP.
But US marine spokesman Lieutenant Colonel T.V. Johnson denied any incident occurred and insisted the US military had no record of any such episode.
Fallujah is a bastion of the Sunni Muslim insurgency against US-led forces in Iraq. A US airstrike on a suspected militant safehouse in the city killed 20 people late Wednesday.
Before Friday’s raid, a leading insurgent leader challenged US troops to fight on the ground as angry demonstrators protested the death of the 20 killed two days earlier.