Iraq shipped oil exports at less than half the typical rate on Monday as bad weather slowed the main southern Basra terminal and a blast idled the northern pipeline to Turkey, officials and shippers said.

Oil exports flowed at around 860,000 barrels per day (bpd), down from average rates of close to 2 million bpd, shipping agents said.

'There is a storm in the south that has contributed to the delay of exports,' an Iraqi oil official said. 'It's just a storm, nothing else.'    

Basra exported at the rate of 860,000 bpd on Monday and Sunday, down from 1.68 million bpd on Saturday.

A bomb blast last Wednesday halted oil exports through the northern pipeline to Turkey, Iraq's North Oil Company said on Monday.

'A bomb hit a pipeline transporting crude to Ceyhan in Turkey and halted exports on Wednesday,' said a source from the North Oil Company who declined to be named.

A repair team was close to completing work on the damaged line, another source said. Pumping would resume 'in the coming hours', Iraq's Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad said on Monday.

The blast was the first to hit Iraq's secondary export route for many months.

Tighter security has allowed Baghdad to boost the flow through the line since August 2007. Sabotage and technical problems kept the route mostly idle until last year following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Oil in storage at Ceyhan on Monday stood at around 1.2 million barrels, the shipping agent said.-Reuters