In Washington today, many blame America's terrorism problem on Saudi Arabia. In an August 2003 Washington Post op-ed, for instance, Senators Jon Kyl and Charles E. Schumer accused Riyadh of continuing to deceive the United States, "acting as our ally [while] supporting a movement--Wahhabism--that seeks our society's destruction."
But Saudi Arabia has a scapegoat of its own: Yemen. The Saudi government says smugglers from its neighbor provide the explosives and weapons used by radical Islamists, who carried out two massive suicide attacks against civilian targets in Saudi Arabia last year, killing more than 50 and injuring hundreds. Saudi Arabia, one of the most vocal critics of Israel's security fence, is even emulating Israel's example, erecting a highly contentious barrier along its porous frontier--part of a larger plan to build an electronic surveillance system across the entire length of the kingdom's land and sea borders.
Yet this strategy is unlikely to succeed. Yemeni smugglers moving arms and explosives are already developing creative ways to evade Saudi controls. And, for the crackdown to be effective in stopping the weapons trade, Riyadh will need the cooperation of the Yemeni government, which is not likely to be forthcoming. In Sa'ada, only 25 miles from the Saudi border, I walked through the biggest of Yemen's numerous arms bazaars, where row after row of dealers peddled firearms, grenades, and rocket launchers. I was offered an 85-millimeter surface-to-surface missile for only $2,500--a projectile that could blow through a building. Anti-aircraft missiles, the type of weapon fired at an Israeli jetliner in Kenya last year, were no longer on display, but, when I asked a few dealers, they told me these heavy weapons were still available--for the right price. "There is complete freedom here," a Sa'ada local said proudly. "Anyone can buy whatever they like, as long as they have enough money."
The smuggling of drugs, alcohol, luxury goods, and arms across the mountainous, sparsely populated, and largely unmarked Saudi-Yemen frontier has been a problem for years. Enmity between the two countries has only made it harder to stop. Saudi Arabia has a history of supporting disaffected Yemenis, in an effort to destabilize a country Riyadh sees as a security threat because of its large population and strategic location. When Yemen was divided into two nations during the cold war, opposition to unification became a stated Saudi foreign policy objective. When Yemen unification took place nonetheless in 1990, the Saudis increased clandestine funding to various Yemeni insurgent groups. According to a prominent Yemeni journalist, many tribal leaders in Yemen opposed to the central government in Sanaa remain on the Al Saud payroll. And the two countries have continued to squabble over how to demarcate their shared border. This conflict peaked in the early '90s, resulting in border clashes in 1994. Three Yemeni soldiers were killed by the Saudis in border skirmishes as recently as 1998, and, despite an agreement reached by the two nations in 2000, resentment lingers.
In recent years, cross-border smuggling has grown more prevalent and violent. Between March 2002 and February 2003, 36 Saudi border guards were killed in Jizan, a Saudi frontier town. And these arms are now going to terrorist groups. The Saudi media have reported that the perpetrators of a series of recent terrorist attacks inside the kingdom used explosives smuggled in from Yemen. Since the May 12 bombings, Saudi border patrols have seized weapons and explosives in large quantities on a daily basis, including more than 90,000 rounds of ammunition, dozens of grenades, more than 2,000 sticks of dynamite, and hundreds of bazookas.
Worried, the Saudi government is beefing up border protection. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz recently told Arab journalists that Riyadh constantly pressures Yemen to police the frontier more seriously. Not content to rely on Yemeni cooperation, Riyadh is also building a border-surveillance system. The project, which will include fences, cameras, and other electronic-detection equipment designed to prevent vehicles from crossing the frontier, has quietly been in the planning stages for several years. According to a recent report in the Paris daily Le Figaro, the French aerospace group Thales is "on the verge" of being awarded the contract to oversee construction of the system--a contract said by Le Figaro to be worth up to $8.75 billion.
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