US pulls out of Saudi Arabia

2003-04-30 08:44

Riyadh - The United States has decided to end 13 years of military presence in Saudi Arabia, a key demand of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and hardline Islamic groups across the Middle East.

But US and Saudi officials were quick to say the pullout, announced on Tuesday, was not due to disputes or demands by bin Laden and even some Saudi opposition figures, who have called for foreign troops to leave the kingdom, the cradle of Islam.

"It's not some action dictated by bin Laden. Bin Laden was irrelevant to this decision," a senior US military official insisted.

The pullout was announced by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the end of a brief visit to the ultra-conservative kingdom and billed as part of a US plan to reduce and reshuffle its forces in the Middle East following the coalition's ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

"By mutual agreement the aircraft that have been involved will be able to leave," Rumsfeld told a press conference with Saudi defence minister Prince Sultan.

"It is now a safer region because of the change of regime in Iraq...We will rearrange our forces in this part of the world," Rumsfeld added.

Prince Sultan said that following the end of Operation Southern Watch, in which US and British warplanes enforced a no-fly zone over southern Iraq, "there's no need for them to be here".

"This does not mean we have requested them to move, and it does not mean our friendship has been (adversely) affected," he added.

"The cooperation between our two countries was going on even before Desert Storm (in 1991 to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation) and it will continue even after the end of the war in Iraq."

Saudi Arabia first opened its doors to foreign troops in 1990 when more than 500 000 US troops, in addition to tens of thousands of British, French and Arab troops poured into the country following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

After Kuwait was liberated in the Desert Storm campaign, the United States maintained several thousand air personnel and dozens of aircraft to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq.

Their presence in a country that houses Islam's holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina has aggravated anti-US sentiment, giving rise to religious protests and widespread arrests.

Some Saudi officials said the US military presence had become a political liability both domestically and in the wider Arab world.

It also gave ammunition to bin Laden, who declared an all-out war against the US forces in Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda network has carried out a number of anti-US attacks, the most spectacular of which were the September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on New York and Washington.

Fifteen Saudis played a major role in those attacks, after which the United States launched its war on terror.

Years earlier, in June 1996, a massive truck bombing at the Khobar Towers apartment building in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar killed 19 US airmen and wounded more than 370 people. A year earlier, a suicide bombing at a US military facility in Riyadh killed several people.

It was not established if bin Laden had a hand in either of these two attacks.

But the bombings prompted the US military to move its air operations to Prince Sultan Air Base in the Kharj desert, some 80km south of Riyadh.

Washington later established a $45m state-of-the-art combined air command centre at the base, which coordinated the air war against Baghdad and the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001.

The centre has now been shifted to Al-Udeid air base in neighbouring Qatar.

American air operations will be shut down totally at Prince Sultan by the end of the summer, US officials said on Tuesday.

About 100 coalition aircraft were still at Prince Sultan base on Tuesday, compared to a peak of 200.

US-Saudi military cooperation will continue in the form of training and hardware imports. - Sapa-AFP

- SAPA