A sniffer dog search has sparked an anti-US protest in Baghdad as pipelines blaze north of the capital, with America's top general saying he is unsure whether his forces will stay in Iraq beyond next year.
"Down, down USA," shouted thousands of government employees today angered by the detention of a woman who refused to be searched by US soldiers using a sniffer dog at the oil ministry in Baghdad.
Soldiers fired a few shots in the air to disperse the workers from the Oil Ministry and nearby ministries.
"I have been coming here for 27 years and now they (Americans) are searching us with dogs. We are Muslims," Mr Saadiya Ahmad, an oil ministry engineer said.
Dogs are considered unclean in Islamic culture.
"We don't just want the dogs to leave. We want the dogs who are holding the dogs to leave, every last one of them," said one employee, Mr Nazir Mohammed.
A man who gave his name as Sabeeh said troops had handcuffed a woman employee and made her stand in the sun for an hour because she had refused the search.
Sniffer dogs are routinely used to search for explosives at government ministries to guard against bomb attacks.
In the north, pipelines that feed a Baghdad refinery and power station were ablaze, a day after a sabotage attack.
Iraqi Lieutenant-Colonel Khalid Mohammed Rashid, who works for a force protecting key installations, said an explosion had set fire to four pipelines just south of the Baiji oil refinery, 120 miles north of Baghdad.
"What happened was sabotage," he said, adding that one of the pipelines takes gas to Baghdad's Daura refinery, while the two oil pipelines feed a power plant in the city. A fourth carries liquefied petroleum gas.
Baiji, north of ousted President Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit and the scene of past sabotage attacks, is the site of a refinery that receives crude via a pipeline from Iraq's Kirkuk oilfields.
Sabotage has hit efforts to revive the oil industry, while guerrillas have killed 104 US soldiers since Washington declared major combat over on May 1st.
"They (terrorists) are accustomed to the US backing down," Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told 1,500 Marines at a base in California yesterday.
"They think they can break our will," Myers said. "There will be a demand on our armed forces for some time to come. I don't know if it will go to 2005. We just don't know that."