Counterterrorism Blog

Smoke covered the sky in Baghdad yesterday as insurgents bombed a pipeline in one of the city's southern suburbs and hit an oil distribution center in northern Iraq with mortar rounds. Both attacks caused fires, and CNN reports that the attack on the oil distribution center "halted the flow of crude oil to Iraq's largest refinery."

It's entirely intuitive why terrorists would target oil installations. On the one hand, attacks on pipelines and refineries damage the economy of the country whose installations the terrorists are targeting. But these attacks also damage countries that are dependent on petroleum imports, notably the United States. Over a year ago I wrote an article entitled "Al Qaeda's Oil Weapon" that describes the evolution in al-Qaeda's thinking on the issue. While Osama bin Laden declared Saudi oil wealth off limits as a military target in 1996 because it was a key resource for the caliphate that he wished to establish, his thinking shifted as crippling the U.S. economy became the centerpiece of his strategy for defeating America. In mid-December 2004, an audiotape by bin Laden instructed his followers to focus their operations on oil production, "especially in Iraq and the Gulf area, since this [lack of oil] will cause them to die off [on their own]."

Terrorists -- both those affiliated with al-Qaeda and also those who aren't -- have frequently targeted oil sources. Al-Qaeda has purportedly claimed responsibility for two mid-September suicide bombing attacks against Yemeni installations in the Mareb and Haramut provinces that came just thirty-five minutes apart. In August, the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) targeted a natural gas pipeline in Turkey, the latest in a string of PKK attacks against Turkish natural gas pipelines. In February, two suicide bombers launched an unsuccessful attack against the world's biggest oil processing complex, the Abqaiq complex through which nearly two-thirds of Saudi Arabia's oil flows for processing before export. And that same month, as my associate Kyle Dabruzzi has described, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta launched its "Dark February" campaign, attacking Nigerian oil pipelines, kidnapping nine workers, and sabotaging the oil fields.

But most telling is the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security's Iraq Pipeline Watch, which documents a stunning 374 attacks on Iraqi oil pipelines, installations, and personnel from June 12, 2003 through November 2, 2006. We can add these latest attacks to this already voluminous list -- and should expect that future terrorist attacks will continue to target the oil supply.