Islamabad, Pakistan — Officials from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye are in Istanbul on Monday for their first meeting since they signed a new mutual defence pact .
The meeting comes 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, were already in Turkiye by Sunday. Dar flew in from London, where he had just wrapped up a separate visit.
Pakistani officials have suggested in recent weeks that Egypt might also join the Monday meeting — not to discuss the defence agreement, 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 they welcomed the signing of the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran.
But irrespective of whether Egypt attends, analysts say that the spotlight will be on officials from the three countries that signed the joint defence agreement in Mecca on August 7.
The Strategic Political and Defence Committee created under that joint defence agreement is meeting in Istanbul, and while the pact may have established the principle of collective defence, analysts say a key question remains unanswered: Just how will that commitment function on the ground?
Pakistan’s delegation is led by Dar, Munir and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif.
Turkiye is represented by Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, Defence Minister, Yasar Guler, and General Staff Chief, Selcuk Bayraktaroglu.
Saudi Arabia’s delegation includes 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 covers 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.
“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 earlier this year.
Sinem Cengiz, a researcher at Qatar University’s Gulf Studies Center, told Al Jazeera that “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.
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 .
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.
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, though Jordan and the UAE denied that the bases had been hit.
Yamin told Al Jazeera that Pakistan’s credibility, 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”.
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 co-ventures 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 told 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.
However, she said that she did not fully agree with the characterisation of the Mecca pact 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 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.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry has 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 has said that 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 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.
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.
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 that 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, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani, has publicly urged all GCC states to join.
Analysts are split on who moves 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”.
