Turkish Committee Clears the Mecca Pact for a Full Vote
Turkey’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee has approved the mutual defence agreement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, carried by the governing party and its allies over opposition objections. It now goes to the full assembly for debate and a vote. The published text binds the parties for ten years.
This completes a thread we have followed for a week. When the pact was signed in August it committed each party to treat an armed attack on one as an attack on all, using “all necessary means”; Pakistan ratified it, and Turkey began and had not finished. A committee is not the chamber, so ratification is still incomplete, but the direction is now clear and the ten-year term is on the record. The committee’s chairman, from the governing party, made the case in terms designed to reassure rather than deter: the agreement “aims to increase deterrence and cooperation, does not target other countries and is likely to contribute to peace and stability”. That last clause is doing a lot of work in a week when the three signatories’ defence and intelligence chiefs sat in Tehran pressing Iran to rein in the Houthis, and when attacks on Saudi Arabia have continued. Watch the full assembly vote, and whether Iran reads a ten-year commitment as reassurance or as encirclement.