Mood is grim among expats in Saudi Arabia

The windows of a pleasant home overlooked a grove of Arabian date palms swaying in the breeze.

Yet the elegant, green fronds peeped over coils of razor wire arrayed on an 18-foot perimeter wall. In their shade stood three soldiers, ammunition bandoliers draped around their shoulders, manning an armoured car with a heavy machine-gun mounted on its turret.

Not even the dustmen were allowed inside the Arabian Homes residential compound in Riyadh. A soldier armed with an AK47 assault rifle stood guard outside the fortified entrance as bins were wheeled out to the overalled rubbish collectors standing in the street.

Saudi Arabia's western expatriate community, which includes some 30,000 Britons, has gone to ground behind the sandbagged walls of its compounds. Suicide bombers have struck two of these sanctums since May, killing 54 people, two of them British.

Many of these gated communities still ban Saudis from living in these fortified patches of Europe or America, where the shops stay open all day and both men and women use the swimming pool.

Yet the terrorist threat has forced westerners to endure new security measures that are intimidating and suffocating in equal measure.

One Australian expatriate was house-hunting with his wife in Riyadh last week. "We looked around one compound the other day and it had two tanks outside it," he said. "But when someone is determined to kill you by blowing themselves up, how can you stop them? That's the bottom line."

BAE Systems is one of the biggest British companies in the kingdom, supplying the Saudi air force with aircraft, radar and communications and the navy with minesweepers. After the first bombings in May, it announced a special bonus for its employees, payable next month, as an incentive to keep them in Saudi Arabia.

Yet the departure of friends and the ever-present threat of attack are steadily grinding down the morale of westerners. One compound threw a party that coincided with the bombings of British targets in Turkey. No one turned up.

"Boredom, that's the real danger," said one expatriate. "Sometimes you end up asking yourself over and over again, what am I doing here?"