Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye meet: What’s next for their defence pact?

Key Facts

• Fact 1: The meeting came just hours after Washington and Tehran traded strikes for the first time in a month, breaking a lull in a war that has now run for more than six months after the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28.
• Fact 2: The group of four last met in Amman, Jordan, on August 5 and before that in June in Cairo, where it welcomed the signing of the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran.
• Fact 3: The Strategic Political and Defence Committee, created under the joint defence agreement that Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye signed in Mecca on August 7, has now started the work of turning that political declaration – that an attack on any one of the three states will be treated as an attack on all three – into something operational.
• Fact 4: Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, right, arrived in Istanbul on August 30, 2026, and met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan [Handout/Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs]According to Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Turkish officials, the agenda covered military interoperability, joint exercises, defence industrial cooperation, including joint production and research and counterterrorism coordination.