By an OGJ correspondent
NICOSIA, Mar. 21 -- Tanker traffic into the northern Persian Gulf slowed Friday, even as US and British troops pushed into Iraq to take control of key oil facilities in the country's northern and southern regions.
"There's a lot of oil on the water at the moment and ships are staying away from Kuwait for the time being," one broker told OGJ. "The market's gone soft and everyone's really taking stock of the situation," he added.
"Someone's bound to go into Kuwait, if the price is right," another said. But he added that "there's just no need at the moment, particularly given the risks. There's plenty of oil elsewhere and insurance rates to Kuwait are on the rise."
Another source told OGJ, "Operations in all Kuwaiti sea ports (have) stopped temporarily due to the missile attack on Iraq yesterday," but he said loadings of crude from Kuwaiti ports had resumed despite reports of targeting by Iraqi missiles.
The US Navy's Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, warned ships' masters Wednesday that the Khawr Abd Allah, a waterway dividing Kuwait and Iraq, may be mined, and it issued a second warning on Thursday about military action in the Persian Gulf.
"All maritime vessels or activities that are determined to be threats to coalition naval forces will be subject to defensive measures, including boarding, seizure, disabling, or destruction, without regard to registry or location," the Navy said.
Key southern targets secured
Meanwhile, UK commanders said on Friday that British marines took control of key oil export terminals on the Faw peninsula following an overnight seaborne assault on Iraq's Gulf coast.
Commanders had feared that Iraqi troops might sabotage the peninsula's oil terminals, creating oil spills or fires that could hinder their attack and cause an environmental disaster.
Reports said the first marine companies had succeeded in securing their three main objectives—an oil metering station and two pipeline outlets that account for virtually all of Iraq's seaborne oil exports.
Those outlets are thought to be the UN-authorized oil terminal of Mina al-Bakr and Khor al-Amaya, recently put to use by Baghdad for illicit oil smuggling.
British forces have also taken Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, in southern Iraq, and coalition forces have secured the country's nearby extensive southern oil fields, in a bid to thwart possible sabotage attempts by Iraqi forces, which torched more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells during the 1991 Gulf War.
"The US Marines are moving well into the Rumaila oil fields and it seems like we will be able to seize much of the oil structure intact," Colonel Chris Vernon told Reuters by telephone from the Kuwaiti desert, prior to securing the fields.
Well fires reported
However reports have surfaced about some fires already ablaze in Iraq's southern oil fields. Britain said as many as 30 oil wells had been deliberately set alight in southern Iraq, a fraction of the 400 wells in the Rumaila fields—the workhorses of the southern oil region capable of pumping more than 1 million b/d of oil.
"Several of the oil heads have been set on fire by Saddam Hussein's forces in an attempt to deflect us from the task," British forces spokesman Group Captain Al Lockwood told Reuters in an interview in Doha.
Meanwhile, there were unconfirmed reports that US special forces may have secured the Kirkuk oil fields in northern Iraq.
"The oil fields of Kirkuk, which are the busiest in Iraq, may have been already secured by American special forces," correspondent John Simpson told BBC World television from the region's front line.
He said the BBC could not verify the intelligence report of the oil fields' capture.
The US has vowed to take over the giant fields of Kirkuk in the north and Rumaila fields in the south to protect Iraq's resources from sabotage and return crude exports to world markets as quickly as possible.
