ISTANBUL (The Thursday Times) — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan will hold the first committee meeting under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement in Istanbul, a Turkish foreign ministry source told Reuters, even as a separate meeting of the Regional Four foreign ministers, which also includes Egypt, converges on the same city days after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye signed the pact.
Foreign ministers, defence ministers, and chiefs of staff from the pact’s three signatories are set to attend the committee meeting, with international security issues, enhancing defence capabilities, and greater interoperability among the three militaries on the agenda, according to the Turkish source. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed on August 7, commits each signatory to treat an armed attack on any one of them as an attack on all three, a clause modeled on NATO’s Article 5, and was signed against a backdrop of regional conflict that has included Iranian missile fire on Gulf oil exporters.
Running alongside it is a meeting of the Regional Four, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, a standing consultative format whose most recent round was held in Amman on August 5 on the sidelines of talks on Jerusalem. This Istanbul round carries added significance as the first R-4 engagement since the Mecca pact’s signing, giving Egypt, which Turkish officials have floated as a potential future member of the defence pact itself, a forum to weigh in without being a signatory. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan extended the invitation for the R-4 round to Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, who has since arrived in Istanbul, according to Pakistan’s state broadcaster PTV News, after concluding an official visit to the United Kingdom where he met British Foreign Secretary David Lammy and other officials. PTV News reported Dar was received on arrival by senior Turkish protocol and military officials alongside Pakistan’s Ambassador to Türkiye, Dr. Yusuf Junaid.
The clustering of both meetings in the same city reflects the pace at which Pakistan’s defence diplomacy in the Gulf and Middle East has moved since September 2025, when Islamabad first signed a bilateral mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia. That bilateral pact expanded into the trilateral Mecca agreement this August, arriving within weeks of Kuwait signing its own expanded defence protocol with Pakistan, part of a network that now spans four countries in under two years. It also comes as Pakistan continues a separate, parallel diplomatic effort: Field Marshal Asim Munir has traveled to Tehran repeatedly this year as part of Islamabad’s mediation between the United States and Iran, an effort running on a track distinct from, but shaped by the same regional tensions as, this week’s Istanbul meetings.
Turkish officials have stressed the Mecca pact remains open to further members and is not intended to replace existing alliances such as NATO. Egypt’s potential involvement, discussed at Amman and now again in Istanbul, remains an open question rather than a settled outcome, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has separately said the pact’s vision was never restricted to its three founding members. Analysts have described the combination as pairing complementary strengths, Turkey’s defence-industrial capacity, Saudi Arabia’s financial weight, and Pakistan’s military experience and nuclear-armed deterrent, a mix that has made the framework attractive to other regional states weighing their own security options.
