World News
Mecca Pact Ties Three Sunni Powers Together As Iran-backed Attacks Loom
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact in Mecca on Friday that never once named a threat, and within hours Iranian officials and clerics had named it for them, mocking the agreement and promising that “the roar of our missiles” will reach its signatories.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hosted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, declares that an armed attack on any of the three will be treated as an attack on all.
A Turkish official called the pact “purely defensive,” directed at no specific actor and open to other countries in the region.
The signatories’ combined weight explains the attention. Turkey fields NATO’s second-largest military, Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s top oil exporters and home to Islam’s holiest sites, and Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed Muslim state.
The pact caps nearly a year of negotiations and builds on last year’s Saudi-Pakistani defense agreement, under which some 8,000 Pakistani troops, fighter jets and an air-defense system have already deployed to the kingdom.
The timing needs little decoding. Since the war began on February 28, Iran and its allies have struck US bases and civilian infrastructure across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Jordan, shut the Strait of Hormuz to most shipping, and, through the Houthis, declared a naval embargo on Saudi ports in the Red Sea.
For Riyadh, three years of regional war have also raised a harder question: whether the American security umbrella it built its plans on still opens.
Tehran answers the question nobody asked
The pact’s statement avoided Iran’s name. Tehran filled the silence itself.
“The Saudis should know that a paper agreement with Turkey and Pakistan will not bring them security, just as years of one-way nursing of the Americans brought them none,” Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, wrote on X. “Correct your policies so you no longer need to go begging for security.”
The clerical establishment was blunter. “Borrowed security and begging America for security will not save you,” Alireza Arafi, the Friday prayer leader in Qom, told regional governments.
“As long as you are with the enemies of Islam and Iran, the roar of our missiles will threaten you.”
In Ahvaz, another Friday preacher said Iran was working to extend its missiles’ range to 15,000 kilometers so that “the American people, too, will see what it is like to be left in blood and destruction.”
For a pact its authors insisted was aimed at no one, the replies arrived from one address.
Riyadh braces, Baghdad moves
The agreement was signed against specific and immediate warnings. A Saudi official told CNN the kingdom is preparing for coordinated attacks on energy facilities, ports and airports by Iraqi militias and Yemen’s Houthis “in the very near future,” under the guidance of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, citing intelligence that included tracked meetings between militia and Guards personnel and movements of drones and missiles.
Baghdad, unusually, is moving against the same groups. An Iraqi government official told Iran International the country is “on the verge of delivering the final blow” to Iran-backed militias, with intelligence indicating planned operations not only against Saudi Arabia but against Kuwait, Jordan and Syria.
Iraq’s armed forces said a security plan is underway to foil any attack on the kingdom, and troops have been ordered to prevent Iraqi territory from being used for missile and drone launches at neighbors.
The warnings follow a week in which the Houthis struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and hit Najran’s airport, wounding 11 civilians, including a four-year-old child.
Reporting by Asharq al-Awsat and Israeli media describes a joint Houthi-Iraqi operations room established at Jurf al-Sakhr, the militia stronghold south of Baghdad.
A deal Tehran wants, on terms it dictates
The day’s other track ran through Muscat.
Iran’s parliament confirmed the framework of an understanding with Oman has been agreed, and lawmaker Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani described its logic with unusual candor: Iran is negotiating with America “in Oman’s name,” he said, over an arrangement that would leave the strait’s management in Iranian hands and charge passing ships a tariff of 7 percent of cargo value, split three-quarters to Tehran and a quarter to Muscat.
President Donald Trump sounded confident and noncommittal at once. “It’s obvious they don’t want to be hit. They want to make a deal. So, we’ll see,” he said, adding that gasoline prices would rise only if he had to “do another hit” on Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Arab mediators doubt Iran’s diplomats have the authority to deliver any Hormuz deal they sign, as hardliners accuse the negotiating team of giving too much away.
That doubt, in the end, is what Friday’s ceremony in Mecca was about. Three of the region’s heaviest states have concluded that whatever emerges from the talks, the threat that closed the strait and burned their ports will outlast the paperwork, and they intend to face it attached to one another rather than waiting, separately, for Washington.