An explosion hit a stalled Iraq oil pipeline on the Syrian border today, and firefighters put out a fire at a gas pipeline damaged in an earlier blast.
"An explosion took place in the oil pipeline near the Syrian border at 1 a.m. (10 p.m. last night Irish time) last night," said an Iraqi Oil Ministry official.
The US military said it was checking the report.
Washington halted the Syrian pipeline by bombing a pumping station during its invasion of Iraq in April, stopping some 200,000 barrels a day of exports.
The United States has not announced any intention of reopening the pipeline. It lists Damascus as "a state sponsor of terrorism".
The Syrian pipeline is Iraq's second-largest cross-border export link after the northern pipeline that runs from the Kirkuk fields to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast.
Iraq resumed its first oil exports since the war from Ceyhan yesterday, and pumping on the Ceyhan line is expected to restart by mid-July.
Witnesses at the damaged gas pipeline in the western desert said Iraqi civil defence workers had used foam to extinguish a fire that had raged since the blast there on Saturday night.
Oil Ministry officials said that explosion was the work of saboteurs. The US military has not confirmed this.