Google Alerts - SAUDI Arabia plans to build a 900-kilometre, $700 million high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour Iraq.The barrier, which will snake across the long desert frontier between the two countries, is due to be completed in 2008. If built in Australia, the fence would easily cover the distance between Sydney and Melbourne.
Once complete, it will revolutionise security on a border where currently the best weapons in the fight against terrorists are 100 sniffer-dog teams.
"The feeling in Saudi is that Iraq is way out of control with no possibility of stability," said Nawaf Obaid, director of Saudi Arabia's National Security Assessment Project. "The urgency now is to get that border sealed - physically sealed," Outwardly the great desert wall will appear mundane, with two metal barriers running 100 metres apart, lined with barbed wire at the base and top.
On the Iraqi side, alarms will notify patrols if an intruder attempts to scale or cut through the fence. Between the two fences will be yet more barbed wire, piled in a tall pyramid.
But its effectiveness will rely on its more sophisticated or hidden countermeasures. Under the baking sand will be buried sensor cables relaying a silent alarm to monitoring posts at regular intervals along the border. At the posts, face-recognition software will process pictures relayed from cameras, which will also be able to operate at night.
Behind the line of the fence, command and control centres with heliports will provide bases for troops to respond to any alert.
"The costs are not going to be about just building the fence but equipping it too," said Mr Obaid, whose organisation advises the Saudi Government on security affairs.
For Saudi Arabia, terrorists and refugees from the conflict in Iraq are not the only unwelcome intruders.
"We suffer badly from illegal immigration, as well as the smuggling of drugs and weapons and even prostitutes," Mr Obaid said. "It is becoming a major issue."
Saudi Arabia's military is keeping some aspects of the fence under wraps. One source said the project was being kept so secret that military officials from Centcom, America's central command responsible for Iraq, have been told they cannot inspect the site on "national security" grounds.
Even spy satellites will not be able to unravel the fence's secrets. The source speculated the reason for the secrecy might be automated weapons systems attached to the fence that could fire on suspected intruders.
Mr Obaid said: "The fence is a fresh sign that key allies of the United States in the Middle East are resigned to worsening violence and the possible break-up of Iraq, where American intelligence agencies said this week that the continuing conflict fuelled global terrorism."
For Saudi Arabia, whose nationals have been accused of playing a key role in the Iraq insurgency, the deterioration in its northern neighbour is a security nightmare.
Saudi officials are worried about so-called "blowback", in which Saudi insurgents in Iraq bring jihad back to the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah.
But they are mostly concerned that an Iraqi civil war would send a wave of refugees south, unsettling the kingdom's Shia minority in its oil-producing east.