By Khalid al-Ansary
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's national grid has been bombed 22 times in the last month, hampering efforts to boost power supply after years of war, the electricity ministry said on Thursday.
Twenty attacks from April 13 to May 11 toppled 20 transmission towers, most of them carrying power lines between the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and restive Nineveh province to the north, officials said.
"Every attack takes time and consumes money that had been directed towards investment but instead goes to rehabilitating the lines," Mohammed Jaafar, general director of power transmission in the electricity ministry, told a news conference in Baghdad.
During the news briefing, Jaafar was handed a slip of paper that told him two additional towers had been targeted by bombs in northern areas of the Iraqi capital.
An inconclusive parliamentary election more than two months ago raised concerns of escalating violence in Iraq after a sharp fall in the number of attacks since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07.
More than 100 people were killed in a series of attacks on Monday that appeared aimed at proving Sunni Islamist insurgents were still a potent force in Iraq despite the recent deaths of two top commanders.
Seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, the national grid still only supplies a few hours of power each day. Intermittent electricity is one of Iraqis' top complaints.
The country's electricity plants are designed to produce about 11,000 megawatts of power but they are running at about half that level, officials said.
The assault on Iraq's feeble power grid included three bombings along a 223-km (140-mile) transmission line between western Baghdad and the northern city of Baiji and two on a 183-km (115-mile) line between Baiji and Mosul, the most populous city in the north.
Hassan Wahab, an adviser in the electricity ministry, said Iraq could not fully protect the lines and towers.
"If we want to do this, we will need an army three times the size of the Iraqi army," he said. "It needs huge money allocations and we would have to turn all Iraqis into soldiers."
Wahab said he believed the sabotage campaign was being conducted by foreign nations that opposed Iraq's political process, but did not mention specific countries.
The government plans to boost power capacity to 27,000 megawatts in four years after opening its gas sector to foreign investment and sealing a gas capture deal with Royal Dutch Shell , Iraqi Electricity Minister Karim Waheed told Reuters on Sunday.
(Editing by Jim Loney)
