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 meeting between senior officials from the three countries. 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 that 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, 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 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 war on Iran.
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 deal. 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 — 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. Pakistan’s delegation was led by Dar, Munir and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif. Turkiye was represented by Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, Defence Minister, Yasar Guler, and General Staff Chief, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu.
Saudi Arabia’s delegation included Foreign Minister, Faisal bin Farhan, Defence Minister, Khalid bin Salman and General Staff Chief, Fayyad al-Ruwaili. According to Pakistan’s foreign ministry 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, 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, 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. A headquarters was already set up in Saudi Arabia, he noted, after the formation of a separate Saudi-led maritime coalition earlier this year.
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