Israel Matzav

Truck bomb destroys (Iranian?) cargo ship in Iraq's Umm Qasr port

A truck bomb destroyed a cargo ship in the port of Umm Qasr, near Basra, Iraq on Saturday.

Shipping traffic was unaffected by a truck bomb at Iraq's southern Umm Qasr commodities port on Saturday, a maritime transport official said.

"Shipping movements and unloading operations at Umm Qasr port were not disrupted by the explosion," Mahdi Askar, an official with the state-run General Company for Maritime Transport told Reuters.

Askar and a provincial official said the blast was caused by a truck bomb. Umm Qasr is near the oil-exporting southern city of Basra. It does not handle crude exports but receives grain shipments and heavy equipment used in the oil industry.

This report claims that the cargo ship was Iranian, but there's no indication of that here.

The blast damaged an out-of-service Iraqi ship anchored there and wounded four porters, the head of the Basra provincial security committee, Jabbar al-Saedi, told Reuters.
   
"It's a serious breach to the port security and a terrorist act targeting Iraq's economy," he said.
   
The truck had been parked near one of the port's unloading berths, he added.

...

Iraq's economic infrastructure has been hit hard by frequent militant attacks. An oil export pipeline between Iraq and Turkey has been bombed about 30 times since the start of the year, the oil ministry said last week. The pipeline was hit again late on Friday.
   
Sunni Muslim militant groups, including al-Qaida, have stepped up their insurgency against Iraq's Shi'ite-led government in the past four months.
   
More than 30 people were killed and scores wounded in Baghdad on Thursday after a series of car bombs, part of a wave of violence that has taken the monthly death toll to the highest levels in around five years.

It's good that Obama declared victory and got US troops out of Iraq, isn't it? Now it's so peaceful there. And I'm sure it will be even more peaceful once it becomes a province of Iran.

What could go wrong?

Labels: al-Qaeda, Barack Hussein Obama, Iraq, Islamic terrorism

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:11 PM