Islamabad, Pakistan — For the first time since it was signed in August, the Mecca pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye is now in force.
At an emergency meeting in Riyadh on Monday, the pact’s top committee agreed to deploy Pakistani and Turkish forces to the kingdom, which is backing an offensive against Yemen’s Houthis.
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“The Committee decided to move immediately to the practical implementation of the collective defense commitments and to take the necessary measures to provide the agreed military forces and capabilities and ensure their rapid deployment in the Kingdom, in accordance with the approved arrangements and the national legislation of the Parties,” said a joint statement shared by Pakistan’s Foreign Office.
The statement did not specify the size or role of the forces.
Saudi-led coalition spokesperson Major-General Turki al-Malki said 100 fighter jets were supporting a counteroffensive by the internationally recognised Yemeni government to retake territory seized by the Houthis last month.
Hours after the meeting, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said Pakistani forces were already playing a part.
“The forces of Turkiye and Pakistan are playing a supporting role. We are definitely involved in reconnaissance and such things, but the combat is practically being conducted by Saudi Arabia’s own forces, and they are the ones retaking those areas,” Asif told Geo News, speaking from Riyadh on Monday night.
That leaves Pakistan in a defensive role alongside a Saudi offensive. Analysts told Al Jazeera that it raises a question Islamabad has yet to answer publicly: How long can it stay out of the actual fighting?
What is already in place?
Pakistan already had a military presence in Saudi Arabia. It has trained Saudi military personnel since 1967, with a 1982 agreement formalising the deputation of troops to the kingdom.
A declassified CIA assessment from June 1985 estimated that 13,000 to 14,000 Pakistanis were serving in the Saudi army, including an armoured brigade at Tabuk. During the 1990-91 Gulf War, Pakistan also sent a large contingent to the kingdom for defensive duties.
Pakistan also signed the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, which treats aggression against either country as aggression against both.
In April, Riyadh confirmed that a Pakistani force, including fighter and support aircraft, had arrived at King Abdulaziz airbase in the Eastern Province.
Pakistan has not disclosed how many of its troops are in Saudi Arabia.
In September, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, director-general of the military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), told the Saudi outlet Arab News that Pakistani forces were already deployed to protect the kingdom and its holy sites.
“I would like to underscore here the word ‘physically’,” Chaudhry said. “We will go to any extent.”
ISPR did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the deployment agreed upon in Riyadh.
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s Ministry of Information said in a post on X that the country’s commitment to the security of the holy sites and the kingdom was not negotiable.
“The operational details of the actualisation of the collective deterrence are a matter of operational confidentiality and may not be made subject of media speculation,” the ministry said.
Turkiye’s footprint is less clear.
Asif said Turkish forces were also present, but Ankara has not publicly confirmed any deployment.
“There is no publicly acknowledged standing Turkish deployment in Saudi Arabia,” Gokhan Ereli, an international relations expert at Istanbul’s Ibn Haldun University, told Al Jazeera.
Ereli noted that under Article 92 of Turkiye’s constitution, the authority to send troops abroad rests with the parliament, which has yet to ratify the Mecca pact.
What could deterrence look like?
Dania Thafer, executive director of the Gulf International Forum, said Riyadh wants the pact to carry real weight.
“Saudi Arabia is trying to turn the Mecca pact from a political declaration into a deterrent,” she told Al Jazeera.
For now, she said, Riyadh mainly wants Pakistan and Turkiye to help defend Saudi territory and reinforce its air and missile defences, showing that another attack is no longer only a Saudi-Houthi matter. The Houthis have attacked multiple Saudi cities and facilities, including the East-West Pipeline that Riyadh has been using to export oil amid Iranian restrictions on transit through the Strait of Hormuz during the ongoing war waged by the US.
Saudi authorities said two airports in the kingdom had been hit on Monday evening, injuring at least three people.
But Saudi Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman’s account of the meeting went further than what Thafer suggested.
“The committee agreed to activate collective deterrence measures within the framework of the Alliance in response to the attacks and all those responsible for them,” he wrote on X.
Thafer said the wording was deliberate.
“‘All those responsible’ is intentionally ambiguous. It tells the Houthis that Saudi Arabia may go beyond intercepting missiles and strike any actor or infrastructure enabling those attacks. It is also simultaneously warning external sponsors that Riyadh is watching the entire support network,” she said.
However, Pakistani officials have been more cautious.
“The document itself says, first, that it is defensive in nature. It has no offensive agenda,” Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said at a news conference in Islamabad on October 2.
Tughral Yamin, a retired brigadier and senior associate at Islamabad’s Institute of Policy Studies, said Pakistan’s contribution was likely to be specialised rather than large.
“Pakistan is most likely going to beef up its existing presence with air defence units, drones, battlefield communication systems and offensive cyber specialists, men from the corps of engineers to lay and lift mines, some special service troops. Nothing more than that, I would say,” he told Al Jazeera.
Ereli expects Turkiye’s role to be similarly limited.
“The realistic response would be calibrated and mostly non-ground. That means diplomatic coordination, intelligence sharing, emergency resupply of air defence, drones and electronic warfare, and perhaps naval or air-defence assets,” he said.
Could it extend into Yemen?
Thafer said two campaigns were now running side by side.
“There are really two concentric operations taking place: one is defending Saudi Arabia; the second is changing the military balance inside Yemen so the Houthis cannot continue attacking Saudi territory from a position of growing strength,” she said.
Pakistan has not said publicly where its role stops.
Asked by reporters in Rome on September 30 whether Pakistani forces had joined strikes in Yemen, Asif did not answer directly.
“I’m not going into detail, but obviously, when I say that we are bound by this arrangement to defend Saudi Arabia, that means whatever means are available at our disposal, they’ll be available to Saudi Arabia also,” he said.
Pakistan has faced this question before.
In April 2015, its parliament unanimously resolved that “Pakistan should maintain neutrality in the Yemen conflict so as to be able to play a proactive diplomatic role to end the crisis”. But the resolution also pledged that Pakistan would stand with Saudi Arabia if its territorial integrity were violated or the holy sites threatened.
Monday’s joint statement justified the deployment in similar terms and condemned the attempted targeting of Mecca and Medina.
Tehran, though, is watching closely. On Sunday, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said Tehran hoped reports of a Pakistani deployment for war in Yemen were untrue. He warned that any new intervention would only complicate the situation.
At the same news conference last week, Dar said he had raised the pact with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in New York in September, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly.
“I made them aware that we are in a defence pact, and as Muslims, we have to honour it, and God willing, we will,” he said.
He said the Iranian leaders had suggested engaging the Houthis politically rather than through military action. Monday’s statement made no mention of a political track.
Javad Heiran-Nia, an analyst with the Persian Gulf Studies Group in Tehran, said Iran draws a clear distinction between defending Saudi territory and infrastructure and attacking the Houthis in Yemen.
“In general, if Pakistan’s deployment is purely defensive and limited to the protection of Saudi installations, Tehran can tolerate it. However, if Pakistan joins offensive operations against the Houthis, Iran regards it as a red line, since it views the Houthis as part of its strategic depth in the Arabian Peninsula,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Currently, Pakistan’s mediation has shifted from neutrality to management of conflicting interests, and its credibility is highly fragile,” he added.
Institute of Policy Studies’ Yamin, too, said the onus was on Islamabad.
“Pakistan needs to draw its red lines carefully to prevent its troops [from] getting involved in combat operations against the Houthis. So the question should [be] not how will they get involved but how can they prevent getting involved,” he said.
How long will it last?
Much depends on what Riyadh wants from Yemen.
“Riyadh probably wants a short, high-intensity campaign that restores deterrence rather than another open-ended Yemen war,” Thafer said.
But Yemeni government forces this week said they were no longer limiting their ambitions to regaining territory lost to the Houthis in recent weeks, and were in fact aiming to retake the capital, Sanaa, held by the Iran-backed group since 2014.
“Military campaigns are determined by objectives: securing Saudi territory and Bab al-Mandeb could potentially be limited,” Thafer said. “Trying to fundamentally defeat the Houthis or retake Sanaa would be a very different and potentially much longer war.”