Saudi Arabia deploys 30000 troops to Iraq border

  Written by : Mohamed Abdel Fattah

Jul 03, 2014

 Saudi Arabia has deployed 30,000 soldiers to its border with Iraq after Iraqi forces abandoned their posts on their side of the border,Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television said on Thursday.

Saudi Kingdom , shares an 800-km (500-mile) border with Iraq,where mlitants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant captured seized towns and cities last month

Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz ordered on Thursday “all steps” be taken to safeguard kingdom from jihadists battling the government in neighbouring Iraq.

Al-Arabiya satellite channel aired video showing some 2,500 Iraqi soldiers in the desert area east of the Iraqi city of Karbala after pulling back from the border and soldiers said that they had been ordered to quit their posts without justification. Iraq's government later denied that its forces had abandoned their posts, claiming the border is operating as usual.

Separately,King Abdullah pledged $500 million in humanitarian aid for Iraq on Tuesday to be disbursed through the United Nations to those in need regardless of sect or ethnicity, said a source at the Foreign Ministry.

The United Nations says 1.2 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes by violence this year, hundreds of thousands of them by a three-week-old Sunni militant offensive that has swept up a swathe of territory north of Baghdad.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has been informed of the Saudi aid, which will be "provided through UN agencies to the Iraqi people only,"

The King Abdullah has accused Maliki of being responsible for the current unrest in the country as a result of his pro-Shia, anti-Sunni policies, which he alleges have led to the rise of the Islamic State (IS)

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISISL) , the Sunni extremist group that has seized large swaths of Iraq's north and west in recent weeks and seeks to create an Islamic territory across both sides of the Syria-Iraq border.

The Sunni militants have captured advanced weapons, tanks and Humvees from the Iraq military that have made their way into Syria, and that fighters are crossing freely from one side to the other have alarmed the Syrian government

ISIS militants are fighting the governments on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, and an apparent decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to intervene to help Maliki further tangles the already complex knot of actors in the overlapping crises.

Sources

arabnews

Reuters.

Dailymail

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