Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey said on Monday that they had agreed to deploy military forces to the kingdom under their new mutual defense pact, answering Houthi attacks on Saudi targets as a Saudi-backed counteroffensive gets underway in Yemen.
The three countries decided to “provide the agreed military forces and capabilities and ensure their rapid deployment” to the kingdom, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, said the members agreed to act in response “to the attacks and all those responsible for them.”
The decision came at an emergency meeting in Riyadh of the alliance’s Strategic Political and Defense Committee. It answers a question that has hung over the pact since it was signed on Aug 7: whether Islamabad and Ankara would actually invoke it. The agreement declares that an attack on any one of the three states will be treated as an attack on all, mirroring NATO’s own mutual defense rule, but it initially spelled out no specific military obligations.
After the Houthis fired a barrage of missiles toward Saudi Arabia in early September, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, told the Pakistani outlet Geo News that an attack on the kingdom could set the pact in motion. “If there is unprovoked aggression, or a spillover of whatever is happening in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, definitely the Mecca agreement will become operational,” he said.
No troops moved until Monday. Analysts have noted that Pakistan and Turkey have been eager to keep mediating the conflict between the United States and Iran. The joint statement said the deployments would proceed under “approved arrangements” and the laws of each country. Together, the three militaries field nearly 1.4 million active troops, about 3,400 military aircraft, 6,000 tanks and more than 340 naval vessels, according to the 2026 Global Firepower Index.
The deployment comes as the Saudi-backed Yemeni government opens a counteroffensive to retake territory the Iran-aligned Houthis captured last month, and as Riyadh pledges a firm response to the group’s attacks.
In Washington on Monday, President Trump sought to shift blame for high fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections away from the American-Israeli war on Iran and toward Democrats and Ukraine. “What’s driving up Gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz, because Record Numbers of Barrels are coming out now on an almost daily basis, but the word, ‘Refineries,’ where Russia’s are being blown up by Ukraine, and where ours are being closed up, in Blue States, like California, by the Dumocrats,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, arrived in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Monday for the first stop of a four-day European tour that will also take him to Greece and Portugal. “Economic and security collaboration” tops the agenda for his talks with Icelandic officials, according to a State Department statement.