Pakistan Deploys Jet Squadron, Thousands of Troops to Saudi Arabia
Exclusively today that Pakistan has deployed a jet squadron and thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia in support of Riyadh during the Iran war, in the most concrete signal yet that the Pakistani mediation track between Washington and Tehran is being run in parallel with material Pakistani support to Iran’s Sunni-state neighbour. The deployment supplements existing Pakistani assistance to the Saudi armed forces and is being treated by analysts as a hedge against the war’s expansion into a wider Sunni-Shia regional contest. The deployment was reported in the same news cycle as Saudi Arabia’s interception of three drones from Iraqi airspace.
Pakistan’s mediation track has been the most consistent diplomatic channel between Washington and Tehran since the war began. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said over the weekend that Islamabad was repatriating eleven Pakistani citizens and twenty Iranian nationals from vessels seized in the high seas by the United States, indicating that the Pakistan track is also handling the operational fall-out of the US blockade. The exclusive deployment story is consistent with the wider pattern of regional realignment now under way: a parallel Reuters report this evening noted that Syria is to join the G7 finance talks in Paris this week — a marker of the post-Assad government’s growing diplomatic standing — while New York Times reporting confirms Israeli outposts in the Iraqi desert and the deepening UAE-US-Israel-Sunni-state security architecture.