WASHINGTON, Aug 27: The US military has shut down the last remaining Air Force unit at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and a skeleton crew of American personnel was making final preparations to leave the desert facility, officials said on Wednesday.

The move comes as the United States decreases to almost zero its military profile in Saudi Arabia, where the presence of American troops has generated resentment because of their proximity to Islam’s holiest sites.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz announced on April 29 that the United States would end military operations in the oil-rich kingdom and remove virtually all its forces.

Lt Gary Arasin, a spokesman at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, said Maj-Gen Robert Elder presided over a de-activation ceremony for the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing on Tuesday at Prince Sultan Air Base, presenting a plaque to a Saudi colonel.

“That signifies that we are getting ready to turn the base back over to the Saudis, or our portion of where we held operations. It was a Saudi base all along,” Mr Arasin said.

He said fewer than 200 US troops had remained at the facility, primarily security personnel and civil engineers getting the base ready to turn it over to the Saudis after more than a decade there. He said a small number remained there to finish the clean-up process.

US forces removed most troops and all the aircraft from the base in June.

A US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said dozens of US military advisers remained in Saudi Arabia to assist the Saudi military in training. The United States had maintained a high-tech air operations centre at the base whose functions now have been moved to Qatar. This air operations centre controlled air strikes during the Iraq war. The United States had also used the facility to patrol a “no-fly” zone over southern Iraq.

American military personnel there generally numbered about 5,000, with thousands more during the Iraq war.

The presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia had generated resentment within the kingdom and in the Arab world because of their proximity to Islam’s holiest sites. It was a major grievance cited by Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept 11 attack in the United States.

Mr Rumsfeld has said the removal of Saddam Hussein as president of Iraq has changed the dynamics in the Persian Gulf region and allowed the United States to shift forces out of Saudi Arabia. —Reuters