Militants kill Saudi army general, two soldiers along border with Iraq

Three soldiers were killed and at least three others injured in Saudi Arabia on Monday when four suspected Islamic State (IS) militants attacked a security patrol near the Iraqi border.

A Saudi security official – speaking on condition of anonymity – told the Associated Press (AP) that the four armed men had come from inside Iraq to attack the border guards.

The local Al-Watan newspaper said the commander of the northern border guard – Brig. Gen. Oud Awad al-Balawi – was among those killed in the attack.

The state-linked Sabq news site said the gunmen were armed with hand grenades, pistols and explosive belts.

A spokesperson for Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry said four “terrorists” fired on the border patrol at 430am [0130 GMT] in the Northern Borders Province.

“The border guards dealt with the situation accordingly and surrounded the attackers, killing one of them in the process. One of the terrorists, however, detonated an explosive belt he was wearing, killing himself and two border guards and injuring a third policeman," Major-General Mansour al-Turki told the state-run SPA news agency.

Locals told the AP Saudi military aircraft could be heard and seen overhead throughout Monday.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Saudi Arabia shares a 1,100 kilometre (745-mile-long border) with Iraq. Monday’s attack was the first since Riyadh joined the US-led coalition that is carrying out airstrikes against the IS group in Syria and Iraq.

In November Saudi authorities told residents living near the Iraqi border to move for at least a year, after the buffer zone was widened to 12 miles. Officials said the buffer zone had been expanded to keep out “infiltrators and smugglers”.

Saudi Arabia to reopen Iraq embassy

The attack comes just days after Saudi Arabia announced on Saturday that it was sending a delegation to Iraq ahead of opening an embassy in Baghdad where its last mission closed nearly 25 years ago.

A foreign ministry statement said the delegation would "take the necessary decisions to choose and equip buildings" for an embassy in Baghdad and a consulate in Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region in the north.

Diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iraq were severed in 1990 but restored in 2004 after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

However, Riyadh had not yet reopened its embassy in Baghdad.

This mission to do so was decided after contacts between the neighbouring states, the official SPA news agency cited a Saudi foreign ministry spokesman as saying.

Last November, Iraqi President Fuad Masum visited Saudi Arabia for the first such high-level trip in years in a sign of warming relations after years of strain between the two countries.

Within the kingdom there has been a groundswell of support for IS, with a surge in pro-IS activity on Twitter detailed by news site Vocative during the summer. It found that 95 percent of mentions on the hashtag #ABillionMuslimsForTheVictoryOfTheIsis came from Saudi Arabia, according to the news site.

Although IS are not thought to be officially operating in Saudi Arabia at the moment, violence against Shiite worshippers in the Eastern Province in late 2014 led to activists saying the attackers were likely motivated by the group’s ideology.