{"id":601611,"date":"2026-08-31T13:42:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/601611\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T13:42:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:42:21","slug":"pakistan-saudi-arabia-turkiye-meet-whats-next-for-their-defence-pact-military-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/601611\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye meet: What\u2019s next for their defence pact? | Military News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Islamabad, Pakistan \u2014\u00a0Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye have formally called their new mutual-defence pact<\/a> the Mecca Defence Alliance, announcing the name on Monday in Istanbul after a meeting between senior officials from the three countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a secretariat that has been established in Riyadh, and the first secretary general will be appointed amongst our Pakistani brothers,\u201d Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said at a press conference after the talks.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

Fidan said the alliance was based on \u201cinternational principles such as respecting the sovereignty of other states, territorial integrity and not intervening in internal affairs,\u201d and that it remained \u201copen for the partnership and participation of any other country\u201d in the region.<\/p>\n

The meeting came just hours after Washington and Tehran traded strikes for the first time in a month, breaking a lull in a war that has now run for more than six months, after the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28.<\/p>\n

Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan\u2019s Chief of Defence Forces, and Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar had arrived in Turkiye by Sunday. Dar flew in from London, where he had just wrapped up a separate visit.<\/p>\n

Pakistani officials had suggested in recent weeks that Egypt might also join Monday\u2019s proceedings, not to discuss the defence pact itself, but as part of a foursome that has played a key mediating role in trying to end the US war on Iran.<\/p>\n

The group of four last met in Amman on August 5 and, before that, in Cairo in June, where it welcomed the signing of the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran.<\/p>\n

On Monday, though, the focus was on the three countries that have inked the mutual security deal.<\/p>\n

The Strategic Political and Defence Committee, created under the joint defence agreement Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye signed in Mecca on August 7, has now started the work of turning that political declaration \u2014 that an attack on any one of the three states will be treated as an attack on all three \u2014 into something operational.<\/p>\n

How its institutional structure will actually function, including when the mutual-defence clause itself would be invoked, remains unclear.<\/p>\n

Making the pact work<\/p>\n

Pakistan\u2019s delegation was led by Dar, Munir and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif.<\/p>\n

Turkiye was represented by Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, Defence Minister, Yasar Guler, and General Staff Chief, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu.<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia\u2019s delegation included Foreign Minister, Faisal bin Farhan, Defence Minister, Khalid bin Salman and General Staff Chief, Fayyad al-Ruwaili.<\/p>\n

\"Pakistan'sPakistan\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Ishaq Dar, arrived in Istanbul on Sunday where he met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan. [Handout\/Pakistan\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs]<\/p>\n

According to Pakistan\u2019s foreign ministry and Turkish officials, the agenda covered military interoperability<\/a>, joint exercises, defence-industrial cooperation, including joint production and research and counterterrorism coordination.<\/p>\n

Fidan said in an August 8 interview with the Anadolu Agency that a permanent secretariat would be based in Saudi Arabia<\/a>, with its structure and remit still to be worked out among the three members.<\/p>\n

While some have compared the mutual defence clause to NATO\u2019s Article 5, many independent analysts have pushed back on the comparison, noting that the pact has no integrated command, standing force or joint military machinery<\/a> of the kind that underpins NATO.<\/p>\n

Tughral Yamin, a retired brigadier and senior associate at Islamabad\u2019s Institute of Policy Studies said \u201can office or secretariat is a must\u201d for the pact to become operational.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could be in any country, or it could be a rotating office,\u201d he told Al Jazeera, pointing to NATO\u2019s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, based in Mons, Belgium.<\/p>\n

A headquarters was already set up in Saudi Arabia, he noted, after the formation of a separate Saudi-led maritime coalition<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Sinem Cengiz, a researcher at Qatar University\u2019s Gulf Studies Center, told Al Jazeera that \u201cthese details need to be clear before the agreement is sent to the Turkish parliament for ratification\u201d.<\/p>\n

The pact\u2019s full terms, she said, are unlikely to be made public until that process concludes.<\/p>\n

War tests the pact<\/p>\n

The Istanbul meeting comes days after Munir\u2019s fourth visit<\/a> to Iran this year.<\/p>\n

On August 24, he travelled to Tehran and met President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, and Supreme National Security Council Secretary, Mohsen Rezaei, in what Pakistan\u2019s military described as part of its efforts to end<\/a> the war.<\/p>\n

Pakistani officials said the visit produced significant progress<\/a> towards reviving the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad MoU and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Pezeshkian, in turn, said Washington needed to change its tone.<\/p>\n

The optimism was not fully shared in Washington. Two days later, President Donald Trump said the US was \u201cnot in a hurry\u201d over talks with Tehran<\/a>.<\/p>\n

US Central Command struck two Revolutionary Guard rocket launchers on Larak Island<\/a> in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday morning, its first acknowledged strike on Iran in a month.<\/p>\n

\"ProjectilesProjectiles streak across the sky in this screengrab taken from footage published by Iranian authorities purporting to show missiles launched at US military targets in Jordan from an unknown location, released on August 31, 2026. [Wana News Agency via Reuters]<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard retaliated within hours, claiming that it had hit the US-operated King Hussein and Al-Azraq airbases in Jordan with ballistic missiles and the Al Menhad base in the UAE with drones, though Jordan and the UAE denied that the bases had been hit.<\/p>\n

Yamin told Al Jazeera that Pakistan\u2019s credibility, as both Saudi Arabia\u2019s security partner and Tehran\u2019s trusted interlocutor, becomes harder to sustain, \u201cif the proposed trilateral pact evolves into an explicitly anti-Iran alliance\u201d.<\/p>\n

Gokhan Ereli, an international relations expert at Istanbul\u2019s Ibn Haldun University, said the trilateral relationship predates the war, pointing to the decades-old Saudi-Pakistan security relationship and Turkiye\u2019s own pursuit of strategic autonomy.<\/p>\n

The real test, he said, will come once the fighting stops.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the joint mechanisms, institutional secretariat and industrial co-ventures outlast the current cycle of escalation, it will confirm that this pact represents a fundamental restructuring of the regional security architecture,\u201d he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Cengiz was more cautious.<\/p>\n

\u201cOctober 7 and the subsequent events, the fall of the Assad regime and the tensions in the Red Sea have all contributed to reshaping the region\u2019s security landscape,\u201d she told Al Jazeera, referring to Israel\u2019s genocidal war on Gaza after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the ousting of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.<\/p>\n

However, she said that she did not fully agree with the characterisation of the Mecca pact as merely \u201csymbolic\u201d or inherently \u201ctransformative\u201d.<\/p>\n

Umer Karim, of the Riyadh-based King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, told Al Jazeera the war has exposed regional security vulnerabilities that go beyond Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael as a strategic hegemon in the region\u201d has \u201cimplications for all three,\u201d he told Al Jazeera, referring to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye.<\/p>\n

The clearest illustration came days after the Mecca signing, when Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase in northern Syria, roughly 70km (43 miles) from the Turkish border, saying it was preempting a Turkish military deployment there.<\/p>\n

Ankara condemned the strike as an attempt to undermine the trilateral pact.<\/p>\n

Who else might join?<\/p>\n

Pakistan\u2019s foreign ministry has said the pact remains open to other states.<\/p>\n

Dar said on August 9 that the agreement was defensive in nature and did not replace any existing bilateral or multilateral arrangement.<\/p>\n

Fidan has said that Ankara wants to eventually widen the framework<\/a> beyond the three founding states.<\/p>\n

Bangladesh has gone furthest in publicly signalling interest. State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Humayun Kabir, said in late August that Dhaka had expressed interest in the pact and that it would not be unusual for an Islamic country to join such an arrangement.<\/p>\n

Egypt has taken part in earlier four-way security talks with Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan, but was left out of the August 7 signing.<\/p>\n

\"EgyptianThe Egyptian, Turkish and Saudi foreign ministers met in Cairo in June to discuss stability in the region, June 21, 2026. [Amr Abdallah Dals\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Al Jazeera in an August 15 interview<\/a> that Cairo\u2019s accession was \u201cpossible\u201d, saying the pact remained open to further members.<\/p>\n

Egyptian Foreign Minister, Badr Abdelatty, has since said that Cairo is weighing constitutional and legal issues before deciding whether to join, a reference widely read as touching on Egypt\u2019s existing treaty commitments elsewhere in the region.<\/p>\n

Within the Gulf Cooperation Council<\/a>, former Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani, has publicly urged all GCC states to join.<\/p>\n

Analysts are split on who moves next.<\/p>\n

Ereli named Egypt \u201cthe most strategically consequential candidate\u201d, pointing to Cairo\u2019s role as an anchor of Arab diplomacy and its recent rapprochement with Ankara.<\/p>\n

Cengiz was more sceptical of Egypt\u2019s timeline, grouping it with Syria as contingent on how the pact develops.<\/p>\n

She pointed instead to the Gulf states as the more likely near-term movers, naming Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey already have close relations with the signatory countries,\u201d she said, adding that they favour diversifying their security partnerships beyond the US.<\/p>\n

Karim, however, said any expansion would require agreement among the three founding partners on committing to a new entrant\u2019s security, particularly if that state is itself vulnerable to regional threats.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere can be a possibility of either Egypt, Syria or Bangladesh joining,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it will take some time to develop the required understandings amongst all stakeholders\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Islamabad, Pakistan \u2014\u00a0Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye have formally called their new mutual-defence pact the Mecca Defence Alliance,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[337,42,47,2899,43,338,78,40,38,41,39,1582],"class_list":["post-601611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-asia","tag-headlines","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-news","tag-pakistan","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}