Sandflies
are of great medical and economic importance as vectors of disease agents such
as viruses, bacteria and protozoan parasites. Because of the great importance
of these insects in the Kingdom, The present work has been undertaken to
collect and identify samples from different regions  of  the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which included the Central Province (Riyadh and
Qassim), the East Province (El Ehsa), the West Province (AlMadinah AlMunawarh)
and South Province (Abha and Assir). Samples were divided into two parts: the
first included the head and terminalia, which were used for morphological
taxonomy, and the second part included the rest of the body which was used for
molecular taxonomy. Standard keys of morphological taxonomy were used for the
identification and classification of the sandflies. The collected sandflies
were found to belong to five species and two genera. Of these, three species
belonged to the genus Phlebotomus, these were Phlebotomus(P.)
papatasi,  P. bergeroti and P.
 sergenti. The other species belong to genus Sergentomyia,
these were Sergentomyia (S.) antennata, S. clydei.  P. papatasi was the most common
species in all of the collection areas (56.37%), S. clydei
was the second common (23.58%) and S. antennata was the third common
species (8.4%) followed by P. sergenti (7.86%), then P. bergeroti (2.71%) . The second part
of each fly, including the thorax, anterior part of the abdomen and wings, were
used for DNA extraction. The DNA was amplified by the RAPD-PCR method using two
different arbitrary primers, Opa-2 and Ap-16. Species-specific banding patterns
were obtained by this method. Slight differences were observed in the banding
pattern within the species which suggested that there were individual diversity
or that these variations were owing to the presence of subspecies or sibling species
in the same species