Insurgents Blast Iraqi Pipelines

Insurgents blew up an oil pipeline and fired on gasoline storages tanks as U.S. troops intensified their hunt Sunday for rebels and weapons with house-to-house searches in former strongholds of captured leader Saddam Hussein.

In Fallujah, a center of resistance against the U.S. occupation, American soldiers raided homes shortly after midnight. Local journalists reported similar raids in other areas that formed the cornerstone of Saddam's power base, including Samarra, a town north of Baghdad, and Rawah, near the western border with Syria.

U.S. troops have made scores of arrests throughout Iraq, reports CBS News Reporter Lisa Baron.

Troops conducting house to house searches in Rawah, near the Syriain border, have reportedly arrested scores of people, some former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party.

Witnesses in Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, say five people were detained in a pre-dawn raid on several houses.

The U.S. military says that 111 people were arrested within a 48-hour period in the volatile town of Samarra.

Insurgents targeted Iraq's oil infrastructure in an apparent attempt to undermine the U.S.-led occupation, setting fires that blazed for hours and lost millions of gallons of oil as the country confronts a critical fuel shortage.

Rebels firing rocket-propelled grenades hit storage tanks in southern Baghdad on Saturday, creating fires that burned about 10 million liters (2.6 million gallons) of gasoline, said Issam Jihad, a spokesman for the Oil Ministry. Iraqi police were investigating, he said.

Also Saturday, a pipeline exploded in the al-Mashahda area, 15 miles north of Baghdad, in what Jihad called "an act of sabotage."

The U.S. military said Saturday night that it had detained 111 people in 48 hours in Samarra, 75 miles north of Baghdad, including 15 suspected of directing attacks on Americans. In raids in the past, many detainees were released after questioning.

Buoyed by the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam, the U.S. military has maintained intensive hunts for loyalists of Iraq's ousted leader. On Saturday, U.S. forces destroyed a house in Samarra that they said insurgents were using to shoot at passing military convoys.

On Sunday morning, guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a three-truck convoy of U.S. soldiers at a police recruitment center in Mosul, 250 miles north of Baghdad. The projectile hit a passing civilian vehicle, seriously injuring the Iraqi driver, according to a cameraman for Associated Press Television News who was at the scene.

Some of the soldiers in the convoy had dismounted from their trucks before the attack, but none were injured, APTN reported.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, there have been a series of revenge killings against former Saddam loyalists accused of participating in the repression of a 1991 Shiite uprising against Saddam's government.

Saddam brutally repressed the Shiite Muslims, who form 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people but who were marginalized by the former regime. Saddam's capture offered the Shiites their first chance to take a dominant political role in the government of their country.

The president of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, was in neighboring Syria this weekend for talks with President Bashar Assad.

Syria is increasing exports of petroleum products such as gasoline and kerosene to help Iraq through an acute shortage, an Iraqi oil industry source told Dow Jones Newswires on Sunday. Iraq has the world's second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, but dilapidated refineries have hampered production.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the source said that as of Saturday, Syria had started sending Baghdad 300 to 400 metric tons of kerosene and 400 metric tons of gasoline daily, and would start exporting liquified propane gas from Wednesday.

The sales were arranged last week, the source said, with Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization negotiating to pay partly with crude oil, and partly with cash.

In Baghdad, the minister of higher education said tens of thousands of university professors demanding higher wages might strike at the end of the year, and that the U.S.-appointed Governing Council should heed their call for more money.

"Universities are bound to strike as a result of the low salaries of the teaching staff," Minister Zayad Abdul-Razzaq Aswad said.

Many professors earn about $180, a monthly wage that was set by Finance Ministry under the guidance of the U.S.-led coalition that oversees Iraq. Aswad said professors should earn about $1000 a month, roughly what professors in neighboring Jordan make.