Almost exactly a year ago, after Saudi Arabia and Pakistan announced their new defence pact, I argued in Oil to Arms: A Rekindled Alliance that the agreement would ultimately be judged less by its wording than by the crises that followed. One of those crises may now have arrived.
The bilateral relationship has since become something larger. On 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement. Its central promise is straightforward: an armed attack against one of the three states will be regarded as an attack against them all. Barely six weeks later, Saudi Arabia said its air defences had destroyed a Houthi drone south of Makkah before it entered restricted airspace over Islam’s holiest city.
The Houthis reject that version of events with their military spokesman, Yahya Saree, denied that the movement had targeted Makkah or any religious site. That was not a general denial of attacks on Saudi Arabia. The Houthis separately claimed drone and missile operations against other Saudi targets, including Yanbu and Khamis Mushait. Fighting and aerial threats have continued since, with Saudi authorities issuing further warnings across the kingdom on 18 and 19 September.
So there are really two stories here - here is an escalating Saudi-Houthi conflict, which is not seriously in dispute. Then there is the much more politically charged Saudi claim that one of those drones was heading towards Makkah. On that second point, the accounts diverge. Riyadh says its forces stopped a Houthi drone before it reached the city’s restricted airspace and has called the protection of the Two Holy Mosques and pilgrims a “red line”. The Houthis say they never targeted Makkah. There is not yet independent evidence establishing the drone’s intended destination.
That uncertainty makes the incident more interesting, ordinarily collective-defence agreements are easy to describe when the attacker, target and evidence are obvious. The harder cases are the ambiguous ones. If Saudi Arabia considers a drone approaching Makkah sufficient to invoke the political weight of the holy city, would Islamabad and Ankara necessarily reach the same conclusion? And if they did, what would they actually be committing themselves to?
An Alliance Meets Its Name
The Makkah agreement was signed at Al-Safa Palace on 7 August by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Its language is deliberately strong. The agreement is intended to strengthen “collective deterrence”, with an armed attack on one member treated as an attack on all three. Pakistan has publicly described the accord as defensive and consistent with the right of collective self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
That has inevitably produced comparisons with NATO. The comparison only goes so far. NATO's collective-defence commitment sits on top of decades of military planning, command structures, exercises, standardisation and political procedures. The Makkah agreement is barely six weeks old.
On 31 August, ministers and military chiefs from the three states met in Istanbul and agreed to establish a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia, initially headed by a Pakistani secretary-general. They also committed themselves to joint activities, defence-industry cooperation and technology development. Those are meaningful steps, but they also reveal how young the institution is. Much of the machinery needed to make collective defence work is still being constructed.
There is no publicly explained process for deciding how the pact applies to attacks by non-state actors. Nor has the agreement publicly established what level of evidence the three governments would need before treating an incident as an armed attack on all of them. The dispute over Makkah has exposed that gap almost immediately. Pakistan condemned the reported incident and expressed support for Saudi Arabia. Türkiye also backed the kingdom. Yet Saudi Arabia had not, at the time of the initial reports, formally asked either country to enter the fighting.
That is not necessarily hesitation. There is a sensible reason not to allow an intercepted drone with a disputed target to trigger a larger regional war. But it leaves the alliance facing a question that its founding language did not answer: who decides when an attack has happened?
The Yemen Record
The three members arrive at that question from different places. Saudi Arabia has lived with the Yemen war directly. It launched its military intervention in March 2015 after the Houthis seized much of the country and forced the internationally recognised government from Sanaa. Pakistan was asked to join.
Riyadh wanted aircraft, naval vessels and ground troops. After days of debate, Pakistan's parliament unanimously supported Saudi territorial integrity but called for neutrality in Yemen. Pakistan would stand with the kingdom if Saudi territory was threatened, but parliament did not want the country joining the intervention itself. That distinction is suddenly relevant again. Helping shoot down a drone over Saudi territory is one thing. Taking part in strikes on Houthi positions inside Yemen is something else.
Türkiye also backed the Saudi intervention politically in 2015 without joining it militarily. Then-foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said Ankara could provide support including intelligence, while ruling out military participation. Since then, Turkish defence technology has moved much closer to Saudi military operations.
Saudi Arabia has operated the Turkish-developed Karayel drone, and Saudi companies later began licensed production of the armed Karayel-SU. The aircraft can carry Turkish MAM-C and MAM-L guided munitions. In 2023, Riyadh then struck a much larger agreement with Baykar covering Akıncı drones, technology transfer and local production. That gives Ankara several ways to contribute without putting a large Turkish combat force into Yemen: surveillance, drones, electronic systems, munitions, intelligence and defence production.
Pakistan's position is different again because Pakistani forces are already in Saudi Arabia in considerable numbers. Reuters reported in May that Islamabad had deployed about 8,000 personnel, roughly 16 JF-17 fighters, two drone squadrons and an HQ-9 air-defence system. The assets were operated by Pakistani personnel and financed by Saudi Arabia.
Those deployments do not mean that Pakistan is fighting the Houthis. They do mean that if Saudi Arabia asks for defensive help, the question is no longer theoretical. Much of the equipment and manpower required is already there. The line Pakistan drew in 2015 therefore remains useful. Defence of Saudi territory could fit within an established Pakistani position. A renewed offensive inside Yemen would be a much larger step.
Pakistan Between Riyadh and Tehran
This was the underlying problem in Oil to Arms. Closer relations with Saudi Arabia have given Pakistan money, energy security, defence cooperation and strategic importance. They have also made Saudi security crises harder for Islamabad to treat as someone else's problem. The Makkah agreement deepens that connection.
Yet Pakistan cannot view Iran solely through a Saudi lens. The two countries share a border through Balochistan. Cross-border militant violence has already produced direct tensions between them, while Pakistan also has a strong economic interest in keeping Gulf energy routes open.
The Houthis make that balancing act more complicated, they are aligned with Iran, and Iranian weapons, training and technology have helped transform them from a Yemeni insurgent movement into a force capable of using long-range drones and ballistic missiles. But describing them simply as Iranian puppets misses their local origins, Zaydi religious identity and independent political interests inside Yemen. For Saudi Arabia, those distinctions matter less when Houthi drones and missiles are threatening Saudi territory and energy infrastructure. Pakistan has more reason to preserve them.
Islamabad has already been urging Iran to use its influence to restrain Houthi attacks, according to reporting this week, while maintaining that its obligations to Saudi Arabia could become relevant if the kingdom formally sought help. There is also a domestic dimension. Pakistan has a large Shia population. An alliance presented publicly as the defence of Saudi Arabia and Makkah is one thing. An alliance that came to be understood as a Saudi-led Sunni military bloc confronting Iran and its allies would be politically much harder to manage.
This is why the Houthi denial over Makkah matters beyond the question of where one drone was heading. If Makkah itself was deliberately targeted, the politics of Pakistani involvement change dramatically. If it was not, then presenting the wider Yemen conflict through the language of defending the holy city becomes far more contentious.
Three States, Three Domestic Audiences
Calling the agreement the Makkah Alliance gives it a source of legitimacy that an ordinary defence treaty would not have. The Kaaba and the Grand Mosque do not belong politically to Saudi Arabia alone. Their religious importance stretches across borders, sects and political systems. A verified attack on either would therefore be difficult for governments across the Muslim world to treat as an ordinary security incident.
But “verified” is doing a lot of work there. Saudi Arabia says Makkah was threatened. The Houthis say it was not. Until stronger evidence emerges, the alliance is dealing not with an uncontested attack on Islam's holiest city but with competing accounts in the middle of a war. The domestic consequences would also look different in each member state.
Pakistan is probably the most politically sensitive case. Explicitly religious parties have struggled to translate religious mobilisation into national parliamentary dominance. Research on the 2024 general election found weak results for the major religio-political parties, with JUI winning four National Assembly seats and the Shia MWM one among the groups examined. That should not be confused with religion being politically unimportant.
Pew found in 2013 that 84 per cent of Pakistani Muslims supported making sharia the official law of the land. It is an old survey and should not be treated as a measure of opinion in 2026, but it illustrates the depth of religious identification in Pakistani public life. A much more recent Gallup & Gilani survey, conducted in late 2025, found 49 per cent of respondents describing worship as the real purpose of life. The survey covered 961 respondents nationally and had an estimated margin of error of around two to three percentage points.
Neither survey tells us whether Pakistanis would support a war. But they do help explain why a genuine attack on Makkah would be politically difficult for a Pakistani government to ignore. At the same time, the 2015 Yemen vote showed that religious affinity with Saudi Arabia did not automatically produce parliamentary support for military intervention. Those two pressures can coexist.
Türkiye's politics are different. The country has a large religious-conservative constituency centred partly around Erdoğan's AK Party, alongside a substantial secular electorate. Pew research published in 2025 found that 32 per cent of Turkish Muslims favoured making sharia official law for Muslims, while 48 per cent strongly opposed it. Among Muslim AK Party supporters support reached 55 per cent, compared with 20 per cent among Muslims who did not support the party.
That leaves Erdoğan with room to use the symbolism of Makkah and Muslim solidarity, but it does not automatically translate into support for sending Turkish soldiers into Yemen. Military technology is politically far easier. Türkiye can supply drones, sensors, intelligence and defence-industrial capacity while keeping some distance from decisions over a ground or air campaign.
Saudi Arabia operates under a different political system again. It has no national elected parliament equivalent to those in Pakistan or Türkiye, so military decisions do not depend on winning a parliamentary vote. It has also undergone major social changes over the past decade, including the end of the ban on women driving and the return of cinemas. Those reforms have existed alongside continued restrictions on political dissent.
Yet religion remains built into the Saudi state's formal responsibilities. Article 24 of the Basic Law states that the government must maintain and serve the Two Holy Mosques and ensure the safety of those visiting them. The monarch's title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques reinforces the same idea. For Riyadh, therefore, a claim that Makkah has been targeted carries an unusual weight. That also makes accuracy important. Once the holy city is introduced into the politics of the conflict, it becomes much harder to separate an ordinary security dispute from a religious one.
Can the Alliance Actually Defend Makkah?
If the question is narrowly about defence, the three countries have considerable capabilities available to them. Pakistan already has aircraft, personnel and an HQ-9 system in the kingdom. Türkiye has an increasingly sophisticated drone and defence-electronics industry. Saudi Arabia has spent heavily on air and missile defence.
The immediate challenge is less glamorous than the public language of alliances. It is about radar coverage, interceptors, data sharing, command structures and agreeing who has authority to engage an incoming weapon. Saudi Arabia's recent experience shows why that matters. As the confrontation with the Houthis has intensified, Riyadh has reportedly sought additional air-defence help from partners as interceptor stocks come under pressure.
The Makkah agreement could therefore become useful without a Pakistani or Turkish aircraft ever bombing Yemen. A functioning collective-defence arrangement might mean Pakistani air-defence personnel helping protect western Saudi Arabia, Turkish sensors feeding information into a common network or the three militaries coordinating surveillance of the Red Sea. Those are comparatively manageable decisions.
Retaliation is harder. Suppose another drone is intercepted and the launch point can be identified inside Yemen. Would collective defence allow strikes on that position? What if the intelligence was uncertain? What if Iranian components were found in the weapon? At what point does Iranian support for the Houthis become, in Saudi eyes, Iranian responsibility for an attack? And would Pakistan and Türkiye accept the same standard?
The current Makkah dispute is a small version of that future problem. Saudi Arabia says the drone was heading towards the holy city. The Houthis deny it. The alliance has no publicly known mechanism for resolving that disagreement.
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal does not solve it. Nuclear deterrence may have relevance in an extreme state-to-state conflict. It offers very little against drones, mobile launchers, ambiguous attribution or an armed movement operating from another country's territory. Nor does overwhelming conventional firepower guarantee a political solution.
The Saudi-led intervention that began in 2015 possessed a huge technological advantage over the Houthis. More than a decade later, the movement is not only still present but has become better armed and, during the latest fighting, has captured additional territory along Yemen's Red Sea coast. That history should sit in the background of any discussion about what the Makkah Alliance might do next.
A Sacred Name, and a Strategic Problem
The disputed drone incident has not proved that the Makkah Alliance is ineffective. It has shown how quickly the difficult questions arrive. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye signed an agreement promising collective defence on 7 August. By mid-September, the kingdom was facing an expanding conflict with the Houthis and publicly saying that a drone had approached the city that gives the pact its name.
Then the accused party denied that Makkah had been targeted at all. That disagreement goes directly to the problem the alliance has not yet resolved. It is easy to promise that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all. It is harder to decide what counts as an attack, who was responsible and what evidence allies should require before acting.
The Makkah name raises the stakes further. If Saudi Arabia produces convincing evidence of a deliberate attempt to strike the holy city, political pressure on Pakistan and Türkiye to respond would rise sharply. If the evidence remains uncertain, the opposite problem appears. Makkah's religious importance could begin to blur the boundary between defending Saudi territory and joining Riyadh's wider conflict with the Houthis.
That boundary matters most for Pakistan - Its forces are already in Saudi Arabia. Its defence relationship with the kingdom is deep. Yet its parliament has previously distinguished between defending Saudi territory and fighting a war inside Yemen, while its relationship with neighbouring Iran gives it reasons to avoid seeing every regional dispute through a Saudi-Iranian lens. Türkiye has greater room to contribute at a distance through technology, intelligence and industrial cooperation. Saudi Arabia faces the most immediate challenge: protecting its territory and holy sites while persuading its new partners that the threats it identifies justify collective action.
In Oil to Arms, the renewed Saudi-Pakistan relationship was still relatively simple. Saudi financial and strategic support was matched by Pakistani military depth. Türkiye's entry has made that relationship more ambitious. The Makkah agreement now carries claims about collective deterrence, defence production and broader strategic cooperation among three of the most consequential states in the Muslim world.
But greater ambition brings greater exposure to one another's conflicts. The first serious challenge to the pact has therefore produced an unexpectedly basic question. Before the three countries decide how they would defend Makkah, they first need to agree on something more fundamental: how will they know when Makkah has actually been attacked?
Until they can answer that, the alliance's greatest weakness may not be a shortage of aircraft, missiles or soldiers. It may be the gap between the certainty of its promises and the uncertainty of the crises in which those promises will have to be used.
Surveys
Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization - “An Analytical Study of the Electoral Performance of Pakistan’s Religious Political Parties in the General Election of 2024”
https://journals.umt.edu.pk/index.php/JITC/article/view/7248
Pew Research Center (2013 survey) — “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society - Beliefs About Sharia”
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/
Gallup & Gilani Pakistan (2025 survey) - Survey on whether Pakistanis see worship or helping others as life’s central purpose
https://gallup.com.pk/post/39447/
Pew Research Center (2025 survey) - “What role should religion play in Muslim- and Jewish-majority countries?”
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/01/28/what-role-should-religion-play-in-muslim-and-jewish-majority-countries/