Saudi Arabia sends 30,000 troops to Iraq border

Saudi Arabia has deployed 30,000 troops to its border with Iraq, as tribal leaders within the war-torn country reported Iraqi government forces abandoning their posts on the frontier.

Iraqi government officials have denied the army was ordered to withdraw, but Abdul Razzaq al-Shammari, a tribal sheikh from the restive province of Anbar, said troops had been ordered to leave the area close to the Saudi border. Anbar is which one of the areas where Sunni insurgents and militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (known as Isis) have been seizing territory.

“The militias and security forces of the Iraqi government from the western border [with Saudi Arabia] have withdrawn because of the advances of the revolutionaries,” said Abu Abd al-Naami, a spokesman for the General Tribal Revolutionaries, a group he says speaks for tribes across Iraq who are fighting the government.

Since early June, Isis forces have led an insurgency that has swept across swaths of Iraq, taking the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, near the Syrian border, and territories bordering Iran in the east and Jordan to the west.

Mr Naami estimated that there had been 3,000-4,000 Iraqi forces along the Saudi-Iraqi border.

Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television said Saudi troops had been sent to the border because of the Iraqi withdrawal. On Wednesday evening, the channel released a video showing a small group of Iraqi troops on a desert road east of the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, with a truck from the fourth brigade border patrol loaded with supplies.

Saudi analysts, who asked not to be named, said those deployed on the Saudi side of the border were members of the country’s elite airborne forces, along with other elements of the military and ministry of interior forces.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3312faba-0...44feab7de.html

All Force & Faction Is Coming.......makin rame......hehe