Saudi royal family to fortify its kingdom from IS terror..

Saudi's grand plan to thwart IS.The Saudi royal family is building a 600-mile barrier to fortify the northern frontier of their kingdom. The fence and ditch, punctuated with radar surveillance towers, command centres and guard posts, aims to protect the Saudis' oil-rich territory from invasion by the Islamic State insurgency.
Last week, a suicide bombing and gun attack, which killed two Saudi border guards and their commanding officer, was styled by one analyst as the Islamic State's first attack on the kingdom.
Suicide attack No group claimed responsibility for the assault in the remote desert area, but it happened just next to Iraq's Anbar province where Islamic State militants are fighting Iraqi army forces. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud inaugurated the first phase of the border security project in September, soon after Islamic State's Sunni insurgency swept across Iraq.

The multi-layered barrier, which will eventually stretch across the Saudi-Iraq border from Jordan to Kuwait, includes 78 monitoring towers, eight command centres, 10 mobile surveillance vehicles, 32 rapid-response centres, and three rapid intervention squads.
The six-mile-deep barrier consists of a ditch, two fences and a patrol road connecting the watchtowers and guard rooms. Thermal imagers and battlefield radar systems that can detect individuals at up to 12 miles away and vehicles at up to 24 miles away are also part of the barrier.
The Islamic State sees Saudi Arabia's links to the West as a betrayal of Islam and has called for 'lone-wolf' attacks against Saudi security forces, the Shi'ite Muslim minority and foreigners. Saudi forces have joined USled air strikes against Islamic State positions in Syria and mobilised conservative Sunni clergy to describe the ideology of the al-Qaeda offshoot as deviant. Expansion of the Islamic State could turn into an existential struggle for the Saudi regime, which many hardline Islamists see as decadent and corrupt.
Jehadists A key goal of jehadists is the ultimate capture of Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to the Two Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina. Relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia have already been deeply strained.
Riyadh has accused former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of creating the conditions for the jehadist insurgency in his country by marginalising its Sunni Arab minority.
Maliki in turn has accused the oil-rich kingdom of supporting 'terrorism' in Shi'ite-majority Iraq. Three of the four killed in last week's raid were Saudi nationals who local media described as members of the 'deviant group', a phrase authorities use to describe al-Qaeda.
Three more Saudi nationals and four Syrians have since been arrested in Saudi Arabia in connection with the attack.
The Islamic State (IS) group released more than 200 mostly elderly members of northern Iraq's Yazidi minority on Saturday who had been held for months. "The Yazidis were freed on the front line southwest of the city of Kirkuk and met by Kurdish peshmerga forces who brought them to a health centre in Altun Kopri, on road to the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil. These men and women had been held in Mosul, Khodr Domli," a leading Yazidi rights activist. "We already have names for 196 and there could be some more. Some are wounded, some have disabilities and many are suffering from mental and psychological problems," he said.
According to officials from Kirkuk and Arbil, the group was moved from Mosul via Hawija and freed at the Khaled entrance to Kirkuk.