Saudi Border With Yemen Is Still Inviting for Al Qaeda

The border was officially demarcated only in 2000. Much of it remained so informal that many villages on the border’s western edge, near the Red Sea, were half-Yemeni, half-Saudi. Those days ended last year with the war, when the Saudi government evacuated 78 border villages and extended the network of fences it had begun building several years earlier.

The area is an eerie wasteland now — scores of houses, some of them pockmarked with bullets from the war, sit empty and silent. At the top of the mountain where the fighting started last year, Saudi soldiers man a .50-caliber machine gun, gazing across at the unmarked ridges that form the border with Yemen.

Inside the border patrol headquarters in the port city of Jizan, photographs line the wall showing contraband captured by the patrol guards: truckloads of rocket-propelled grenades, huge bricks of hashish, stacks of machine guns.

Drug smuggling has risen by almost a third in the past two years, Saudi officials in Jizan say, with more than 7,000 pounds of hashish seized so far this year. The most dangerous smugglers of all are those who drive through the Empty Quarter, the Texas-size sand desert that dominates the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, patrol officers say.

But far more numerous are the illegal migrants, hundreds of thousands of them annually in recent years. Most are caught and sent back to Yemen after being held in crowded border detention centers for a day or so. Many have crossed the sea to Yemen from Somalia or Ethiopia, risking death on rickety boats in shark-infested waters. Most of the survivors make the arduous journey through Yemen’s arid mountains only to be turned back at the Saudi border.

“Some of them say, ‘If you give me something to eat, I will go back,’ ” said Lieutenant Qahtani, the border patrol officer. “You can only feel pity for these men.”