By Asad Mirza
On August 7, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, an “Islamic NATO”-style mutual-defence pact, in Islam’s holiest city rather than any capital. Born from doubts about US protection after Iranian strikes went unanswered, and Yemen’s collapsing truce, the deal reshapes regional alignments – unsettling Iran, unnerving Israel, and drawing wary attention from India amid a related disinformation flare-up.
On August 7, in the holy city of Makkah, three men who lead very different countries stood together and signed a document that many in the region had been quietly expecting, and dreading, for months.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif put their names to the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, a pact declaring that an armed attack on any one of the three states “shall be regarded as an attack against them all.”
It is the kind of language usually associated with NATO’s Article 5, and the comparisons to an “Islamic NATO” or “Sunni NATO” of the newly-signed arrived within hours.
Choosing Makkah over Riyadh, Ankara or Islamabad was itself a message, and arguably as deliberate as any clause in the text. Makkah is not a seat of government or a political centre; it is Islam’s holiest site, the destination of the Hajj, and a place whose authority derives from faith rather than from any single state’s sovereignty.
By signing there, the three governments reached for a register above ordinary interstate diplomacy – casting the pact not merely as a transactional security arrangement between Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad, but as an act consecrated by shared religious identity, invoking the “bonds of brotherhood and Islamic solidarity” that their own joint statement explicitly cited.
That framing does real work. It offers the two non-Arab signatories, Türkiye and Pakistan, a claim to legitimacy in Saudi-led regional affairs that a Riyadh-only signing would not have conveyed, and it lets Saudi Arabia – custodian of the two holiest mosques – project itself as leader of a broader Muslim collective rather than just one more Gulf state seeking allies.
It also, pointedly, signals to Iran, which anchors its own regional legitimacy in a rival (Shia) religious framing, that Sunni-majority powers can marshal comparable civilisational weight.
At the same time, the venue lets all three governments soften what is, underneath the symbolism, a hard-edged military commitment: a pact “sanctified” in Makkah is easier to sell domestically and regionally, as an act of Islamic solidarity and collective defence of the Ummah, than as a conventional alliance aimed at balancing Iran and hedging against Israel – even though that is precisely what it is.
The pact is not, on its face, revolutionary. It builds on a bilateral Saudi-Pakistan defence agreement signed less than a year earlier, in September 2025, itself a response to Israel’s strike on Hamas leadership in Doha.
What is new is the addition of Türkiye – NATO’s second-largest military and a fast-growing drone and defence-manufacturing power – and the elevation of a bilateral understanding into a trilateral, mutual-defence architecture that Turkish officials say is explicitly open to other regional states.
The timing is not coincidental. Since late February, the Middle East has been consumed by the US-Israeli war against Iran, a conflict that has drawn in Gulf states, the Houthis, Iraqi militias and, increasingly, Saudi Arabia itself.
Iranian missiles have struck Saudi energy infrastructure and even US bases in the region; Riyadh’s expectation of American protection, by most regional accounts, went unmet. That failure is the crucial variable.
Analysts at the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies trace Gulf doubts about US security guarantees back to the 2019 Abqaiq-Khurais attacks, but say they deepened sharply after February 2026, when Iranian strikes on Saudi and Qatari energy sites drew no meaningful American retaliation.
Layered onto that is a second, more immediate emergency: the collapse of the Saudi-Houthi truce. In the days before the Makkah signing, Iran-aligned Houthi forces killed dozens of Yemeni government troops and fired missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco facilities in Jizan and Yanbu, part of what the Houthis call retaliation for Saudi strikes on Hodeidah.
For Pakistan, the calculus is different but complementary. Islamabad has been fighting a border conflict with Afghanistan since February and came close to open war with India in May 2025.
A formal alliance with two wealthy, strategically vital partners buys Pakistan diplomatic heft, economic engagement – and a stage on which its “battle-hardened military” and status as the Muslim world’s only nuclear power become geopolitical currency rather than merely a South Asian fact.
For Türkiye, the pact consolidates its role as the Muslim world’s most capable conventional military power and deepens what Ankara hopes will be commercial payoff: Turkish officials in Ankara say the deal should also boost economic ties with Riyadh and Islamabad, built as it is on “trust.”
Officials on all three sides have been careful to describe the agreement as defensive and not aimed at any specific country. A Turkish official told Reuters it does not abrogate existing bilateral or multilateral arrangements and is open to other states joining. A Saudi source insisted the deal was “not a military axis or sectarian bloc.” Pakistan’s foreign ministry called it a milestone “intended to strengthen collective deterrence.”
But the analytical fine print matters. Harlan Ullman of the Killowen Group cautioned that the operative phrase is “should be regarded as an attack on all” – not “will necessarily be.”
Nobody has yet published the full text, and it remains unclear how automatically, or how far, the three states are actually obliged to come to one another’s defence. The most consequential ambiguity concerns Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Islamabad has repeatedly said its bomb is “not on the radar” in its dealings with Saudi Arabia, and it did not respond militarily when Iran struck the kingdom earlier this year.
Yet, the symbolism of a nuclear-armed state formally binding its security to a non-nuclear one, at a moment when Israel is widely assumed to be the region’s other nuclear power, is impossible to fully separate from deterrence logic – whatever the diplomats insist.
The regional order it signals
What the Makkah pact really represents is less a military alliance than a statement of diminished faith – in the United States as reliable guarantor, and in existing regional architecture generally.
RUSI’s Burcu Ozcelik argues its core purpose is counterbalancing Iranian influence and building deterrence against Israel, “rather than moving towards a confrontation with Tehran.” That reading fits the pattern: none of the three governments wants a wider war, but all three want to signal that they can no longer be picked off individually.
Iran’s response has combined dismissal with menace. Ebrahim Rezaei, an influential member of Iran’s parliament, mocked the agreement as one that “will not bring them security, just as years of one-sided dependence on the Americans did not,” and suggested Riyadh should “reform your policies” rather than “beg” for protection elsewhere – an implicit threat that Tehran’s pressure campaign, via the Houthis and Iraqi militias, will continue regardless of paper guarantees.
Israel has not issued an official response, and neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office nor its foreign ministry has commented, so far. But the pact lands amid rising Turkish-Israeli friction over Gaza and Syria, and echoes warnings from figures like former Israeli premier Naftali Bennett, who in February accused Ankara of building a “hostile Sunni axis” with nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Analysts note the deal could complicate Israel’s freedom to act militarily against Iran’s remaining allies or against Gaza without weighing a wider regional response – even without a nuclear component, the mere existence of a three-way mutual-defence commitment raises the cost of unilateral Israeli action.
It also arguably further distances Saudi Arabia from any near-term normalisation under the Abraham Accords framework, since a security architecture explicitly hedging against Israeli power sits uneasily alongside overt strategic alignment with it.
For India, the pact is uncomfortable mainly because of who is in it. New Delhi’s Ministry of External Affairs said it is “closely following” the development, a studiously neutral formulation it also used for last year’s bilateral Saudi-Pakistan pact.
The concern is less about explicit hostility – Islamabad insists the deal is “not against a third country” – than about Pakistan gaining diplomatic and material heft from two influential partners, one of them (Saudi Arabia) central to India’s own energy and diaspora interests, and the other (Türkiye) already viewed warily in New Delhi over its support for Pakistan during the May 2025 border clashes.
That unease created fertile ground for disinformation. Hours after the Makkah signing, a Turkish outlet’s report – citing unnamed Pakistani sources – claimed India had approached Israel seeking its own defence pact in response.
India’s MEA Fact Check unit swiftly labelled it AI-generated “malicious” content and warned against fake posts, even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Netanyahu separately held a call to discuss the existing India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership – a real conversation that had nothing to do with the invented one.
The Makkah pact does not, by itself, remake the Middle East. Its members have been careful to keep it defensive in language, open in membership, and vague on operational triggers.
But it crystallises a trend that has been building since 2019 and accelerated sharply since February 2026: Gulf and South Asian powers hedging away from exclusive reliance on Washington, pooling capabilities against Iranian and Israeli pressure alike, and doing so through overlapping bilateral ties rather than grand ideological design.
Whether it evolves into a genuine collective-security bloc, or remains what sceptics call it – a paper agreement – will depend less on the text signed in Makkah than on how the war around Iran, and the Houthi campaign against Saudi Arabia, unfolds in the months ahead. (IPA Service)
