Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sign the Mecca defence pact
On 7 August 2026, Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Shehbaz Sharif signed an agreement at Al-Safa Palace stating that an armed attack on any one of the three countries will be treated as an attack on them all. Riyadh insists it is 'neither a military axis nor a sectarian bloc'; thirteen countries read it differently, and Iran, its implicit target, is absent from the account.
