U.S. Says Militants Slip Into Iraq Via Saudi Arabia

Some of the people attacking U.S. forces in Iraq are slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in a television interview on Friday. U.S. soldiers have faced daily guerrilla ambushes since the end of the war that ousted Saddam Hussein in April, but those attacks were overshadowed by Tuesday’s suspected suicide bombing of the U.N. headquarters that killed 24 people. U.S. officials have long suspected some militants have come through Iran and Syria and has warned both against interference in Iraq but have not previously singled out Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally because of its vast oil reserves. However, Riyadh’s cooperation on fighting terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States has left some U.S. officials disappointed. “The borders are quite porous, as you’d imagine, and the fact that we’ve captured a certain number of foreign fighters in Baghdad and around Iraq indicates that the ways that these people are getting into the country is from Iran and from Syria and from Saudi Arabia,” Armitage said in an interview with Arabic-language television channel Al-Jazeera. Full Story