Saudis build 550-mile fence to shut out Iraq

Security in Iraq has collapsed so dramatically that Saudi Arabia has ordered the construction of a 550-mile high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour. The huge project to build the barrier, which will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire, will snake across the vast and remote desert frontier between the countries.

The fence will be built despite the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Saudi kingdom has spent in the past two years to beef up patrols on its border with Iraq, with officials saying the crisis in Iraq is now so dangerous it must be physically shut out.

. . .

But they are mostly concerned that an Iraqi civil war will send a wave of refugees south, unsettling the kingdom's Shia minority in its oil-producing east. "If and when Iraq fragments there's going to be a lot of people heading south and that is when we have to be prepared," said Mr Obaid.

. . .

But the huge centralised project, valued at up to £13 billion, has been slow to get off the ground. Now the kingdom has decided that it cannot afford to wait for Miksa to stave off the threat of violence spilling over from Iraq. Contractors competing for the project will have to promise that they can complete the whole 550 miles of fence within a year.

. . .

"Everyone you speak to in Saudi Arabia says it is now desperately urgent," said Anthony Forester-Bennett, from Westminster International, a British company bidding to help build the fence. "They say there's a real danger of very nasty people coming across from Iraq."


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/01/wirq01.xml

And only 2748 US dead commas and 32,000 maimed & destroyed commas. Oh and the 100,000+ Iraqi commas, but hey, they're brwon-skinned non-Americans. What's less than a comma?

not "very nasty people".