Saudi Arabia expands border buffer zone with Iraq

Saudi Arabia has expanded a buffer zone along its northern border with Iraq, where a U.S.-led military coalition is bombing ISIS militants, official media said Tuesday.

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia has expanded a buffer zone along its northern border with Iraq, where a U.S.-led military coalition is bombing ISIS militants, official media said Tuesday.



Mohammad al-Fahimi, a spokesman for northern region border guards, said “the depth of the border has been increased by 20 kms,” the Saudi Press Agency reported.



Officers guarding the frontier “called on residents and citizens to stay away from the border areas,” it added, without clarifying the previous depth of the border zone.



In early September, the kingdom inaugurated a multilayered fence, backed by surveillance tools, along its northern borders.



The project is part of efforts to secure the kingdom’s desert frontiers against infiltrators and smugglers, state media reported at the time.



Saudi Arabia shares a boundary of 800 kilometers with Iraq.



In July 2009, Riyadh signed a deal with European aerospace and defense contractors EADS to build a high-tech security fence along thousands of kilometers of the kingdom’s borders, not only in the north.



Since September, Saudi Arabia has been part of the U.S.-led coalition bombing ISIS extremists in Syria.



But it has not participated in strikes on ISIS in Iraq, where the extremists have also seized territory.



Iraqi President Fouad Masum visited Saudi Arabia last week in a sign of warming ties after years of strain with the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia is believed to financially and ideologically fuel ISIL terrorist group.

Iraq’s former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused neighboring Saudi Arabia in January of supporting terrorist groups operating inside his country.

“The current terrorism originates from Saudi Arabia,” Maliki said in an interview, blaming the country along with Qatar and Turkey for sponsoring terrorism in Syria and Iraq. Maliki was replaced by Haider al-Abadi in June.

ISIL terrorists are currently in control of large areas across eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq.

They have been carrying out horrific acts of violence, including public decapitations and crucifixions, against different Iraqi and Syrian communities such as Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians.