Command & Control

Saudi Arabia to secure border with high-tech fencing

By Crystal :Low | 2 July 2009

Saudi Arabia has hatched plans to erect a high-tech security fence around 9000 kilometers of the Kingdom’s border.

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The project is part of plans by the world’s biggest oil exporter to bolster frontier surveillance with hundreds of extra radar facilities, coastal detection centres, telecommunications networks and reconnaissance aircraft.

The border security project is an extension of a project that is already underway - called Miksa (Ministry of Interior Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) - to install a razor-wire fence, thermal imaging and radar equipment along Saudi Arabia’s 900-km frontier with northern neighbour Iraq.

The new project reportedly costs over US$2.8 billion and would include a system of security posts and surface and aerial monitoring of Saudi land and sea borders.

The Miksa project was first envisaged in the 1990s in the wake of the first Gulf War to secure Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq with physical fencing and high-tech monitoring.

However, with increased worries over infiltration into the country by anti-government militants and Al-Qaeda operatives, especially from the southern border with Yemen, and a rise in illegal immigration from around the region, the Saudi interior ministry decided to expand the scope of the programme to fence and electronically monitor all the country’s borders.

European aerospace and defence contractor EADS and Al-Rasheed Trading & Contracting Co expect to complete the project within the next five years.