• Defence minister says country bound by eternal pact to respond if holy sites come under attack
• DG ISPR says Makkah pact has no ‘regional aspirations’; talks with India only ‘on equal terms’
ISLAMABAD: Defence Minister Khawaja Asif on Wednesday said Pakistan would “practically and diplomatically” stand by Saudi Arabia against Yemen’s Houthi rebels if the situation escalated.
Commenting on the Pakistan-Turkiye-Saudi Arabia trilateral agreement, the Makkah Defence Alliance, he affirmed on Geo News that an agreement was in place.
However, he said that even if there had been no such agreement, Pakistan was bound by an “eternal agreement to respond if the holy sites come under attack”.
“There are some worldly agreements, too, and they have their own sanctity and obligations, but protecting the holy sites is our religious duty,” he said.
The minister maintained that Muslims around the world did not need an agreement to act if the holy sites in Makkah or Medina came under attack. “There is no need to activate any agreement,” he said.
Asked about any military or political engagement with the Houthis, he said he could not disclose details. “Under the trilateral agreement, if the territorial integrity of a country comes under threat, the agreement will be activated and the other two countries will proceed to protect it in fulfilment of their obligations,” he said. “The situation has arrived.” Sharing his personal view on possible Iranian support for the Houthis, he said Iran, as a state, might not be backing the group as it was already embroiled in another Mideast conflict.
‘No regional aspirations’
Separately, the military’s spokesperson Lt-Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said that the Makkah Defence Alliance has no “regional aspirations” as it is intended for collective deterrence.
“There’s nothing aggressive… It is collective deterrence,” the military spokesperson said during an interview with Al Arabiya English. He added that the Makkah accord was “complementary in nature as it is not competing with any other relationship of these countries”.
About Pakistan’s role in the US-Iran conflict, the ISPR chief said Pakistan could play the role of an “objective arbiter of peace and an honest broker of peace”.
To a query, he said: “Pakistan believes in regional peace, but if India has any “misconceptions about [imposing] regional hegemony through military aggression, the results of that would be beyond their imagination.” On resuming dialogue with India, he said it was for the political leadership to decide. But dialogue, he said, had to be on equal terms.
Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2026
