U.S. Denies Iraqi Oil Pipeline Was Hit in Airstrike

U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters attacked Iraqi military installations Sunday with bombs and missiles after planes patrolling the northern “no-fly” zone came under antiaircraft fire, a U.S. military official said.

An Iraqi Oil Ministry official later said an oil pipeline was severed by a U.S. airstrike, halting the flow of crude oil from Kirkuk in Iraq to Ceyhan in Turkey.

A Pentagon official denied the Iraqi claim.

Army Col. Richard Bridges, the Pentagon’s director of defense information, said the pipeline was neither targeted nor hit.

“We have no indication that we hit anything other than what we intended to hit, which is elements of Iraq’s integrated air defense system,” Bridges said.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry’s director of planning, Faleh Khayat, told a news conference that a deliberate attack by American aircraft hit a pumping station in northern Iraq, killing one Iraqi and wounding two others seriously.

A Turkish official at the Ceyhan oil terminal said that the oil flow had stopped and that an attack had hit “energy transmission lines of a communications center” that operates the pipeline.