RAWALPINDI (The Thursday Times) — Saudi Arabia’s newly appointed ambassador to Pakistan, Dr Rajeh Tami Albugamy, called on Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Asim Munir at General Headquarters on Monday, with both sides voicing satisfaction over progress under the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement and pressing for deeper defence collaboration.
The meeting, confirmed by the military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), covered regional security and defence cooperation between the two countries. The two sides stressed the need to strengthen defence collaboration, institutional links and strategic coordination, ISPR said in its statement.
Field Marshal Munir congratulated Albugamy on his appointment and said he was confident the ambassador’s tenure would further strengthen the longstanding ties between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which he described as rooted in shared faith, mutual trust and strategic partnership.
Albugamy assumed his diplomatic responsibilities in Islamabad last week. Before meeting Munir, he had already called on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, according to local reporting, making Monday’s GHQ meeting one of his first engagements with Pakistan’s military leadership.
Monday’s meeting builds on the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, the trilateral pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye signed in August, which established a joint secretariat and a political, strategic and defence committee drawing on the three countries’ foreign ministers, defence ministers and military chiefs. The agreement also underpins a Saudi-led multinational naval coalition covering the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz, in which a Pakistani naval officer serves as deputy commander.
It also comes a day after Director General ISPR Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry told Independent Arabia that Pakistan regarded the safety of Saudi Arabia’s Haramain al-Sharifain, the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah, as “paramount” and “non-negotiable,” and that Pakistan considered Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity vital to its own security calculus. “Whatever support is needed to do that is being provided and will be provided,” Chaudhry said in that interview.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have deepened military and strategic coordination through 2026 against a backdrop of regional tension tied to the Houthi conflict and wider instability across the Gulf and Red Sea corridor, with Monday’s meeting framed by both sides as a continuation of that trajectory rather than a response to any single new development.∎
