Pakistan's PM Draws 'Red Line' on Mecca at UN as Trilateral Military Chiefs Meet in Riyadh

Since Saudi Arabia sounded its second Mecca danger alert in under ten days and the Houthis seized Mocha while pushing toward Bab el-Mandeb, the diplomatic track has caught up with the military one. On Friday, September 25, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the 81st UN General Assembly in New York that any threat to the "safety and sanctity" of Mecca and Medina is "a red line that must never be crossed," according to Al Jazeera and Arab News. "No Muslim can even dare to think of committing such a heinous act," Sharif said, condemning what he called "deplorable" Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia.

The same day, the military chiefs of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey met in Riyadh to discuss the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, according to Al Jazeera, which cited the Pakistani military. The chiefs reviewed the security situation, affirmed a commitment to "collective defence," and pledged to turn the pact's commitments into "effective cooperation," the Pakistani army said. What that cooperation looks like in practice remains undefined.

Erdogan hints at options, stops short of commitments

In a written interview with Newsweek published Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said support for Saudi Arabia could include "intelligence, logistics or ammunition, with more extensive military assistance possible depending on the scale of the threat," according to Al Jazeera's reporting on his remarks. Erdogan did not specify troop deployments. Neither Ankara nor Islamabad has yet involved itself directly in Riyadh's fight with the Houthis, despite the pact's language that an attack on one signatory is treated as an attack on all.

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed last month by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has not been fully ratified, according to The National. Saudi state media reported Thursday that the urgent chiefs-of-staff meeting was arranged specifically to "explore ways to support Saudi Arabia" under that agreement.

The entanglement risk the UN speech didn't mention

Sharif's UN remarks were pure rhetoric about sanctity and red lines. The Guardian's reporting lays out in detail a practical bind Pakistan now finds itself in.

The original defence pact was signed in Riyadh last September by Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who personally negotiated it with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to The Guardian. At the time, Riyadh offered cash-strapped Pakistan billions in investment and loans, including a recent $8 billion package, in exchange for Pakistan training the Saudi military and, in the event of an attack, defending Saudi territory.

Ayesha Siddiqa, a defence analyst and senior fellow at King's College London, told The Guardian that "I don't think Asim Munir properly calculated the threats the region was facing, and that Pakistan might need to put its troops on the line quite so soon." The pact was built on an assumption, The Guardian reports, that US-Iran relations would stabilize and that a region-wide war was unlikely. Instead, fighting between the US, Israel and Iran that began in late February reignited the Saudi-Houthi conflict and collapsed the years-long truce.

The Guardian's analysts say that if Saudi Arabia formally activates the Mecca pact against the Houthis, Pakistan would have little choice but to deploy troops, including thousands already stationed in the kingdom for training. Saudi Arabia has extensive hardware but, per that reporting, no real combat experience against the kind of guerrilla warfare the Houthis have waged for years. Pakistan's battle-tested forces would be the more valuable asset on paper, which is precisely why analysts see pressure building on Islamabad rather than easing.

A fair reading of Pakistani officials' position is that the pact is defensive and not aimed at any state, as Pakistani officials have repeatedly said, and that Sharif's UN language was calibrated to condemn an attack on a holy site, not to announce troop movements. Turkey Today and the Times of India both frame Friday's speech as primarily symbolic, tied to Islamabad's broader diplomatic role, including the now-unraveled Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between Washington and Tehran. Neither outlet engages with the entanglement risk The Guardian raises.

What happens next depends on a decision nobody has made public: whether Riyadh formally invokes the Mecca agreement against the Houthis, and whether Islamabad and Ankara follow through with anything beyond intelligence and logistics. Pakistan's military has not confirmed troop movements toward Saudi Arabia. The Houthis, for their part, continue to deny targeting Mecca directly, calling Saudi accusations a "heinous lie," per Al Jazeera.