Saudis mull electric fence on Iraqi border

Apparently concerned that fighting in Iraq could spill over into this oil-rich kingdom, Saudi Arabia is considering a major fortification of its 500-mile border with Iraq.

"The government is thinking of building an electrified fence along the whole border with Iraq in case things go really badly in Iraq, and it starts falling apart," says a security adviser to the Saudi government, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the government has not made any official announcement of such plans.It has, however, admitted that it is looking at strengthening its border defenses.

"We are currently conducting a study on technical defense systems which we can use to beef up security measures along the border," Mansour al-Turki, an Interior Ministry spokesman, told the daily Al-Riyadh.

The border with Iraq lies mostly in barren desert. A 20-foot-tall sand berm that runs its entire length provides the first line of defense. Parallel to that is a second berm and a tall fence topped with barbed wire, with a six-mile-wide no-man's land separating the two barriers.

But despite the barriers and extensive electronic surveillance by Saudi border guards using motion detectors and night-vision cameras, some US critics have claimed that suicide bombers have been sneaking across the Saudi border into Iraq to join the insurgency.

One high-level European diplomat in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, defended the Saudi effort at securing its border in Iraq. "I don't think border security is really a problem," says the diplomat, who requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitive nature. "We're impressed with what the Saudis are doing. The problem is with the Americans in Iraq. The American-controlled side of the Iraqi border is less secure because they don't have enough troops deployed there."

According to a recent report compiled by Saudi defense analyst Nawaf Obaid, using government data, the kingdom has already spent $1.8 billion securing its border with Iraq since 2004. "But this amount has been mostly for the deployment of additional troops on the border and not for actual physical defenses," says Mr. Obaid in a telephone interview.

In his report, "Meeting the Challenge of a Fragmented Iraq: A Saudi Perspective," which was published this month by Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, Obaid calls for the creation of a permanent border security committee to tackle cross-border issues between the kingdom and Iraq.

"One of the most critical tasks facing such a committee [is to strengthen] security on the Iraqi side of the border. It is in the interests of both Saudi Arabia and Iraq to confront challenges such as smuggling and terrorist infiltration that an insecure border presents," writes Obaid.

One of the kingdom's major concerns is that Iraq's sectarian violence may spill over and agitate tensions between Saudi Arabia's Sunni Muslims, a majority of the population, and its minority Shiite community. Adherents of two sects that split centuries ago, Sunnis and Shiites have a rocky history of coexistence in many countries.

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