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

Published On 31 Aug 202631 Aug 2026. Updated: 19 minutes agoUpdated: 19 minutes ago.

Key points

• Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan's Chief of Defence Forces, and Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar had arrived in Turkiye by Sunday.
• Saudi Arabia's delegation included Foreign Minister, Faisal bin Farhan, Defence Minister, Khalid bin Salman and General Staff Chief, Fayyad al-Ruwaili.
• Turkiye was represented by Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, Defence Minister, Yasar Guler, and General Staff Chief, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu.
• Umer Karim, of the Riyadh-based King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, informed 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 informed Al Jazeera, referring to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye.

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye have formally called their new mutual-defence pact the Mecca Defence Alliance, announcing the name on Monday in Istanbul after a session between senior office-holders 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 remarked at a press conference after the negotiations.

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

After the US and Israel rolled out attacks on Iran on February 28, the session 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.

Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan's 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.

Pakistani authorities had suggested in recent weeks that Egypt might additionally 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 war on Iran.

In practice, 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.

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

In practice, 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 began 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.

According to Pakistan's foreign ministry and Turkish authorities, the agenda covered military interoperability, joint exercises, defence-industrial cooperation, including joint production and research and counterterrorism coordination.

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

While some have compared the mutual defence clause to NATO's Article 5, plenty of 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 remarked "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 informed Al Jazeera, pointing to NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, based in Mons, Belgium.

After the formation of a separate Saudi-led maritime coalition earlier this year, a headquarters was already set up in Saudi Arabia, he observed.

Sinem Cengiz, a researcher at Qatar University's Gulf Studies Center, informed Al Jazeera that "these details need to be clear before the agreement is sent to the Turkish parliament for ratification".

In practice, the pact's full terms, she remarked, are unlikely to be produced public until that process concludes. War tests the pact.

In practice, the Istanbul session 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 authorities stated the visit produced significant progress towards reviving the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad MoU and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Pezeshkian, in turn, remarked Washington needed to change its tone.

Notably, the optimism was not fully shared in Washington. Two days afterwards, President Donald Trump stated the US was "not in a hurry" over discussions with Tehran.

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

Though Jordan and the UAE denied that the bases had been hit, iran's 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.

As both Saudi Arabia's security partner and Tehran's trusted interlocutor, becomes harder to sustain, "if the proposed trilateral pact evolves into an explicitly anti-Iran alliance", yamin informed Al Jazeera that Pakistan's credibility.

Gokhan Ereli, an international relations expert at Istanbul's Ibn Haldun University, remarked 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 remarked, will come once the fighting stops.

"If 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, " he informed 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 informed Al Jazeera, referring to Israel's 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.

Nevertheless, she stated that she did not fully agree with the characterisation of the Mecca pact as merely "symbolic" or inherently "transformative".

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, the clearest illustration came days after the Mecca signing.

Ankara condemned the strike as an attempt to undermine the trilateral pact. Who else might join?

Pakistan's foreign ministry has remarked the pact remains open to other states.

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

According to Fidan has, ankara wants to eventually widen the framework beyond the three founding states.

Taken together, the developments around pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye meet: What's next for their defence pact? Point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.