Saudi 'won't be base for attacks on Muslims'
Saudi Arabia said today that no troops would be allowed to use its bases to launch attacks on Arabs or Muslims.
Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan told the government-controlled Okaz newspaper: ‘‘We will not accept in our country even a single soldier who will attack Muslims or Arabs.’’
US officials said they had received tacit assurances that Saudi Arabia will allow US troops to use a command centre at a base in Saudi Arabia as a staging ground for military action against exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and
the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The two sides might be able to find a compromise through which US forces direct attacks on Afghanistan from a command centre in Saudi Arabia, but use forces launched from other locations.
The US military presence in the kingdom is sensitive - it is one of the reasons bin Laden has declared war on the US and also has prompted his sharp criticism of his own government.
Saudi officials have in the past dealt with the problem by simply denying it, as Prince Sultan did in the Okaz interview.
‘‘There currently isn’t a single non-Saudi soldier on our land,’’ he told the paper.
Sultan said there are 40 US, British and French airplanes in the kingdom as part of the UN-approved patrols of the southern Iraq ‘‘no fly’’ zone. He did not acknowledge that foreign soldiers are in the kingdom as part of the patrols.
About 4,500 US soldiers and an undisclosed number of US warplanes involved in the patrols are based at the Prince Sultan Air Base in al-Kharj, a vast compound in a remote stretch of desert south of Riyadh, the capital.
Sultan repeated assertions from his government that the kingdom temporarily allowed foreign forces in the country to fight the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1991, but that after Iraqi troops withdrew from Kuwait, foreign forces also withdrew from the kingdom.
