Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye meet: What’s next for their defence pact?

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye have formally called their new mutual defence pact the Mecca Defence Alliance, announcing the name in Istanbul after a meeting of senior officials from the three countries.

“There is a secretariat that has been established in Riyadh, and the first secretary-general will be appointed amongst our Pakistani brothers,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Monday at a news conference after the talks.

Fidan said the alliance was based on “international principles, such as respecting the sovereignty of other states, territorial integrity and not intervening in internal affairs” and it remained “open for the partnership and participation of any other country” in the region.

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.

Field Marshal Asim Munir, the head of Pakistan’s military, and Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar arrived in Turkiye on Sunday. Dar flew in from London, where he had just wrapped up a separate visit.

Pakistani officials had suggested in recent weeks that Egypt might also join Monday’s 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-Israel war on Iran.

The group of four last met in Amman, Jordan, on August 5 and before that in June in Cairo, where it welcomed the signing of the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran.

On Monday, though, the focus was on the three countries that have inked the mutual security deal.

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

How its institutional structure will actually function, including when the mutual defence clause itself would be invoked, remains unclear.

Making the pact work

Pakistan’s delegation was led by Dar, Munir and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif.

Turkiye was represented by Fidan, Defence Minister Yasar Guler and Chief of the General Staff Selcuk Bayraktaroglu.

Saudi Arabia’s delegation included Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman and Chief of the General Staff Fayyad al-Ruwaili.

According to Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Turkish officials, the agenda covered military interoperability, joint exercises, defence industrial cooperation, including joint production and research and counterterrorism coordination.

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

While some have compared the alliance’s mutual defence clause to NATO’s 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 of the kind that underpins NATO.

Tughral Yamin, a retired brigadier and senior associate at Islamabad’s Institute of Policy Studies, said “an office or secretariat is a must” for the pact to become operational.

“It could be in any country, or it could be a rotating office,” he told Al Jazeera, pointing to NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, based in Mons, Belgium.

A headquarters was already set up in Saudi Arabia, he noted, after the formation of a separate Saudi-led maritime coalition this year.

Sinem Cengiz, a researcher at Qatar University’s Gulf Studies Center, told Al Jazeera: “These details need to be clear before the agreement is sent to the Turkish parliament for ratification.”

The pact’s full terms, she said, are unlikely to be made public until that process concludes.

War tests the pact

The Istanbul meeting comes days after Munir’s fourth visit to Iran this year.

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’s military described as part of its efforts to end the war.

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

The optimism was not fully shared in Washington. Two days later, President Donald Trump said the US was “not in a hurry” over talks with Tehran.

On Monday morning, the US military’s Central Command struck two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) rocket launchers on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, its first acknowledged strike on Iran in a month.

Iran’s IRGC retaliated within hours and said it hit the King Hussein and al-Azraq airbases in Jordan with ballistic missiles and the Al Menhad airbase in the United Arab Emirates with drones although Jordan and the UAE denied that the bases, where US forces are stationed, had been hit.

Yamin told Al Jazeera that Pakistan’s credibility as both Saudi Arabia’s security partner and Tehran’s trusted interlocutor would become harder to sustain “if the proposed trilateral pact evolves into an explicitly anti-Iran alliance”.

Gokhan Ereli, an international relations expert at Istanbul’s Ibn Haldun University, said the trilateral relationship predates the war, pointing to the decades-old Saudi-Pakistan security relationship and Turkiye’s own pursuit of strategic autonomy.

The real test, he said, will come once the fighting stops.

“If the joint mechanisms, institutional secretariat and industrial coventures outlast the current cycle of escalation, it will confirm that this pact represents a fundamental restructuring of the regional security architecture,” he told Al Jazeera.

Cengiz was more cautious.

“October 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’s security landscape,” she said, referring to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel, the ousting of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.

However, she said she did not fully agree with the characterisation of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement as merely “symbolic” or inherently “transformative”.

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.

“Israel as a strategic hegemon in the region” has “implications for all three”, he told Al Jazeera, referring to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye.

The clearest illustration came days after the Mecca pact 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.

Ankara condemned the strike as an attempt to undermine the trilateral pact.

Who else might join?

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said the pact remains open to other states.

Dar said on August 9 that the agreement was defensive in nature and did not replace any existing bilateral or multilateral arrangement.

Fidan said Ankara wants to eventually widen the framework beyond the three founding states.

Bangladesh has gone furthest in publicly signalling interest. State Minister for Foreign Affairs Humayun Kabir said Dhaka has expressed interest in the pact and it would not be unusual for an Islamic country to join such an arrangement.

Egypt has taken part in earlier four-way security talks with Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan but did not participate in the August 7 signing.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Al Jazeera in an August 15 interview that Cairo’s accession was “possible”, saying the pact remained open to further members.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty has since said Cairo is weighing constitutional and legal issues before deciding whether to join, a reference widely read as touching on Egypt’s existing treaty commitments elsewhere in the region.

Within the Gulf Cooperation Council, former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani has publicly urged all six of its states to join.

Analysts are split on who might move next.

Ereli named Egypt “the most strategically consequential candidate”, pointing to Cairo’s role as an anchor of Arab diplomacy and its recent rapprochement with Ankara.

Cengiz was more sceptical of Egypt’s timeline, grouping it with Syria as contingent on how the pact develops.

She pointed instead to the Gulf states as the more likely near-term movers, naming Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.

“They already have close relations with the signatory countries,” she said, adding that they favour diversifying their security partnerships beyond the US.

Karim, however, said any expansion would require agreement among the three founding partners on committing to a new entrant’s security, particularly if that state is itself vulnerable to regional threats.

“There can be a possibility of either Egypt, Syria or Bangladesh joining,” he said, “but it will take some time to develop the required understandings amongst all stakeholders”.