Arbil/Dubai: Saudi Arabia has deployed 30,000 troops to its border with Iraq, the pan-Arab television station Al Arabiya said on Thursday, after tribal leaders in Iraq reported that Iraqi government forces were abandoning their posts on the frontier.

The Iraqi prime minister’s military spokesman, however, denied that the country’s border guards had withdrawn from the frontier with Saudi Arabia.

“This is false news aimed at affecting the morale of our people and the morale of our heroic fighters,” the spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassim Atta, told reporters in Baghdad. He added that the frontier was “fully in the grip” of Iraqi border troops.

Abdelrazzaq Al Shammar, a tribal shaikh from the restive Anbar province, said troops had been ordered to leave the Saudi border near Anbar, one of the areas where militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) have been seizing territory .

“The militias and security forces of the Iraqi government from the western border [with Saudi Arabia] have withdrawn because of the advances of the revolutionaries,” said Abu Abd Al Naami, a spokesman for the General Tribal Revolutionaries, a group he says speaks for tribes across Iraq.

“They began withdrawing on Monday and finished withdrawing on Tuesday, when we gave them a 4-hour deadline to retreat safely,” he added.

Since early June, Isil forces have led an insurgency that has swept across swaths of Iraq, taking the country’s second-largest city Mosul, near the Syrian border, and territories bordering Iran in the east and Jordan to the west.

Al Naami estimated that there were 3,000-4,000 Iraqi forces along the Saudi-Iraqi border.

Al Arabiya said Saudi troops had been sent to the border because of the Iraqi withdrawal. On Wednesday evening, the channel released a video of a small group of Iraqi troops on a desert road east of the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, with a truck from the 4th brigade army border patrol, loaded with supplies.

“We weren’t exposed to any attack or anything. We were ordered to withdraw, we don’t know what the reason is,” said one man in army uniform. “There were people from our division who refused to withdraw.”

The tribes of northern Saudi Arabia are linked to the Sunni areas through western Iraq and eastern Syria, where Isil forces and tribal insurgents made rapid gains thanks to the local population’s resentment of the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

The insurgency has reached towns just an hour outside the capital, where its advance appears to have stalled.

Iraq’s Sunni community, which feels it has been marginalised and oppressed by the Shiite-dominated government, hopes the threat of an attack could force Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki to make concessions.

‘Increasing pressure on Saudi Arabia’

Omar Al Mansouri, a local journalist from Anbar, argued that Isil and the tribal advances were not the reason for the retreat. “[Al] Maliki ordered this to increase pressure on Saudi Arabia and bring the threat of Isil overrunning its borders as well,” he said.

Al Maliki and his main backer Iran have accused Riyadh of funding jihadist groups like Isil. The kingdom has denied the accusation, saying Isil is a threat to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Analysts say private donations from Saudi and other Gulf states have helped build Isil into a powerful military force.

Saudi officials have sought to reassure its citizens that the kingdom will protect its borders against any potential threat from the “terrorist” group Isil. The Saudi border is protected by surveillance towers and a security fence, but analysts have questioned its ability to halt determined incursions.

Having taken control of much of the Iraq-Syria border, militants have declared a caliphate in the cross-border territory they control, raising a potential threat to Saudi Arabia’s religious credentials among its conservative Sunni population.

Isil has not openly threatened Saudi Arabia, a leading power among the region’s Sunnis. But Riyadh faced a militant insurgency in 2005 and 2006 and has banned its citizens from joining jihadi forces in Syria.

As Iraq’s army engages in battles with insurgents across the country, the stalemate between the two sides has been complicated by clashes between Shiite militias and government security forces in Karbala.

Saudi ruler King Abdullah held talks with US President Barack Obama on Wednesday, after which both sides agreed on the need for a new Iraqi government to represent all of the country’s communities.

Iraqi politicians this week failed to make any progress towards choosing a new government.

Al Maliki, who won most votes in April’s election, says he is determined to try to form a new government, despite opposition internally and externally from those who say a new face is needed to unite the country.

— Financial Times