Baghdad Under an 'Electricity Siege' As Insurgents Cut Lines

Dec 19 - International Herald Tribune

Over the last six months, Baghdad has become an electrical island as insurgents have effectively won their battle to destroy critical high-tension lines and isolate the capital from the major concentrations of power plants to the north, south and west.

The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of kilometers of exposed lines are constantly felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are also attacked and sometimes killed.

And in a measure of the deep disunity and dysfunction of this nation, when the repair crews and official security forces are slow to respond, highly skilled looters often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to steal as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as possible. The aluminum is melted into ingots and sold.

What amounts to an electrical siege of Baghdad is reflected in constant power outages and disastrously poor service in the capital, with severe consequences for security, governance, health care and the mood of an already weary and angry populace.

"Now Baghdad is almost isolated," Karim Wahid, the Iraqi electricity minister, said in an interview last week. "We almost don't have any power coming from outside." Both Wahid and Western officials in Baghdad said that the amount of electricity flowing into the city was not yet zero, although the Western officials generally presented the more optimistic view.

Wahid said that last week, seven of nine lines supplying power directly to Baghdad were down, and that just a trickle of electricity was flowing through the two remaining lines. Western officials agreed that most of the lines were down but gave somewhat higher estimates on the electricity that was still flowing.

"There's quite a few that are down and that does limit our ability to import power into Baghdad," said a senior Western official with knowledge of the Iraqi grid. "The goal and the objective is to get them up as quickly as we can." Wahid said that he had appealed both to American and Iraqi security forces for help in protecting the lines but has had little response; Electricity Ministry officials said that they could think of no case in which saboteurs had been caught. Payments made to local tribes in exchange for guarantees of security for the lines have been ineffective.

In response to the crisis, Wahid has formulated an emergency master plan that in its first stage involves bringing about 100 deisel-powered generators directly into Baghdad neighborhoods by next summer. That would be followed by a spate of new power plants in Baghdad and major rehabilitation work on existing ones.

All together, Wahid estimates, the program would cost $27 billion over 10 years, although some electricity experts knowledgeable about the plan say that even under optimistic assumptions, those enormous expenditures would not bring electrical supplies in line with demand before 2009.

"I don't know how the people in Iraq are going to accept that reality," said Ghazwan al-Mukhtar, an Iraqi electrical engineer who recently left the country because of the security situation. "That after five years, six years, they are still suffering from a lack of electricity." The reason that the attacks on the so-called 400 kilovolt lines have been especially devastating is that they serve as the arterial roads of the national grid, the gargantuan electrical circuit that was designed to carry power from the energy- rich north and south to the great population center in Baghdad, which has modest generation capacity at best.

Throughout the entire country, there are perhaps 15 particularly critical 400 kilovolt lines, carried by their unmistakable 150- foot, or 45-meter, towers. The entire network runs for some 2500 miles, or about 4,000 kilometers, often passing through uninhabited desert, said Fouad Monsour Abbo, the assistant director for transmission in the Electricity Ministry.

Statistics maintained by the Electricity Ministry over the past year chronicle the dissolution of sections of the grid and the gradual isolation of Baghdad.

In March, at most one or two of the lines were severed at any specific time, but by the summer the typical number had risen to six or seven and had soared to a peak of 12 by early autumn. Electricity officials say that the decisive moment came July 6, when saboteurs mounted coordinated attacks across the country, gaining a lead in the battle that the government was never able to reverse.

"They targeted all the lines at the same time, and they all came down," Abbo said.

Abbo said a typical strategy was to set off explosives at the four support points of a single tower, which would then pull down two or three more towers as it toppled. As repair crews moved in hours or days later, another tower farther up the line might be struck, and then another, in a race the government had little chance of winning.

On Sunday, Abbo recited the most recent measures of the devastation. That day, 40 towers were down on the line running from Baghdad to one of the country's largest power plants in Bayji, in the insurgent-ridden north, and 42 more towers were down on a line connecting Bayji to another big power plant in Kirkuk.

Towers were also down on two separate lines that must pass through the so-called "triangle of death" to connect Baghdad with a power plant to the south in Mussayab, and in four other lines in the Baghdad area or its environs. And the city was entirely cut off from Haditha, the huge hydroelectric dam to the west in Anbar Province, the homeland of the Sunni insurgency.