The Saudi government challenged the George W. Bush administration on Tuesday to prove its claims that Saudi citizens have traveled to Iraq to fight American troops and said US forces have failed to secure their side of the border.
"We are very concerned about this issue because we would like to take action," Saudi foreign policy adviser Adel al-Jubeir said in an interview. "But we have no evidence of Saudis crossing into Iraq and we have received no evidence from the US government."
Al-Jubeir said his government has offered to send its own team of investigators to help US officials identify any possible Saudi expatriate who may have come through other countries, like Iran, or who made it through the porous, desert borders between Iraq and the Saudi kingdom.
"We are willing to send a team to Iraq to look at any evidence they might have," he said. "Saudi Arabia is determined to fight terrorism and to prosecute terrorists regardless of where they are."
Al-Jubeir was reacting to comments by Bush administration officials over the last few days suggesting some foreign fighters have crossed from Saudi Arabia and other countries to help fight the American occupation in Iraq through sabotage and attacks on soldiers.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage suggested Saudi Arabia was among three countries that had not stopped these fighters from crossing into Iraq.
"The ways these people are getting into the country is from Iran and from Syria and from Saudi Arabia," Armitage said in an interview with the Arabic-language al-Jazeera television channel.
"I'm not in a position to assert that the governments of Iran or Syria and Saudi Arabia are in any way responsible. But as a minimum I can state that ... these fighters are not being stopped at the borders," he said.
Those comments came even as the Saudi government struck a deal to allow FBI and US intelligence agents to create a new joint US-Saudi task force to track terrorist financing in the kingdom
Al-Jubeir said Saudi guards are on full patrol along the Iraqi border, but that American troops have failed to re-man the border positions that were abandoned by Iraqi soldiers at the start of the war.
"We have raised this issue with the US a number of times, both before the war and after the hostilities ended," al-Jubeir said.
"We have raised the importance of sealing the Iraqi border with the US government because of concerns there might be smuggling of weapons from Iraq into Saudi Arabia," he added.
The State Department said on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia is cooperating in the war on terrorism but that more could be done.
"We have always said we've got good, solid cooperation with the Saudis on counterterrorism," spokeswoman Julie Reside said. "More can be done and more must be done, but we have a dialogue with them through the US-Saudi joint terrorism commission to share information, to coordinate our response and to address issues that may come up."
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