Turkish Parliament Approves Defense Pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

The Turkish parliament on Thursday ratified the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a trilateral pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that was negotiated in August — right before the Iran-backed Houthi insurgents of Yemen began attacking Saudi cities, airports, and oil refineries.

The Mecca agreement, which was signed on August 7, 2026, in the Islamic holy city that was subsequently menaced by Houthi drones, includes 16 articles. The most important of them commits the signatories to regard an attack on one member of the alliance as an attack on them all, much like Article 5 of the agreement that created NATO.

This aspect of the Mecca pact quickly became awkward because the Houthis started lobbing missiles and drones at Saudi cities, but Turkey and Pakistan did nothing in response. The Turkish government said it did not take action to protect Saudi Arabia because the Mecca agreement had not been ratified yet.

Ratification was finally completed on Thursday by Turkish legislators, who voted 279-119 in favor, with 202 abstentions. The ruling AKP Party holds 280 seats by itself, so the “no” votes and abstentions represented a significant protest.

“They brought this agreement to send Turkish soldiers to the deserts of Yemen,” complained opposition party leader Murat Emir. Turkey’s Ottoman Empire suffered enormous losses fighting wars and skirmishes in Yemen over the course of centuries, so the specter of getting dragged into another quagmire haunts the minds of many Turkish politicians.

Fuat Oktay, the AKP party’s chair of foreign affairs, sought to address these concerns by promising that Turkey will not be “drawn into an uncontrolled process against its will” and any troop deployments would require additional parliamentary approval.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration has said it wants to send a purely defensive deployment to Saudi Arabia, and has no plans to send Turkish forces into Yemen.

“This is a defense agreement. If one of the countries is attacked, you support its defence. This is not an offensive agreement,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said of the Mecca pact in October.

Another complaint raised by the opposition during the contentious parliamentary session on Thursday was that Turkey could get pulled into a conflict between India and Pakistan, which fought a swiftly escalating cross-border battle in May 2025 after a terrorist attack in Kashmir that India blamed on Pakistan. Turkey also would not be eager to get involved in the simmering conflict between Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Some Turkish lawmakers objected to how the Mecca agreement made it very difficult for its signatories to withdraw during the first ten years, arguing that Turkey needs more flexibility to deal with the shifting security environment of the volatile Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a good example, since it is currently building a close relationship with Turkey, but just a few years ago Riyadh and Ankara were bitterly divided over the Saudi killing of writer Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.

Syria has expressed interest in joining the Mecca defensive alliance, promising to “stand by any organisation that protects the security of this area.” Saudi Arabia signed a bilateral military cooperation agreement with Syria on Wednesday, a move widely seen as a prelude to Syria becoming part of the Mecca pact. The Saudis have also been very keen on getting Syria to help against the Houthis.

Turkey launched multiple military incursions into Syria over the past decade, and could find it necessary to do so again. The possibility that the Mecca alliance could grow in unexpected ways was troubling to Turkish lawmakers. Even before the agreement was signed in August, Egypt and Qatar were floated as possible new members.

Interestingly, given how Iran has been treating the Democrat victory in the U.S. midterm elections as a crushing defeat for President Donald Trump and his war effort, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said on Saturday that many analysts “estimate that Iran is about to collapse” from the U.S. blockade and they see an expanding Mecca Alliance as a way to “fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Shiite axis following the fall of the Iranian regime.”