Makkah Alliance military chiefs hold urgent meeting in Riyadh

The military chiefs of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye held an urgent meeting in Riyadh on Friday to discuss ways to support Saudi Arabia under the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement as Houthi attacks on the kingdom escalate, Geo News reported.

Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Asim Munir, Turkish Chief of General Staff General Selcuk Bayraktaroglu and Saudi Chief of General Staff General Fayyadh bin Hamed Al-Ruwaili attended the meeting, which the Turkish armed forces announced on its official X account, Geo News reported; Daily Sabah confirmed the venue as Riyadh.

The session was arranged when the three foreign ministers — Pakistan’s Ishaq Dar, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Turkiye’s Hakan Fidan — met on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, the Saudi foreign ministry said. The ministers discussed arrangements for the urgent chiefs-of-staff meeting, and Turkiye’s defence ministry said on Friday that Bayraktaroglu would travel to Saudi Arabia.

It follows Thursday’s Houthi strikes, with the group saying it fired dozens of missiles and drones at Saudi targets, while authorities said they intercepted six Houthi-fired ballistic missiles, Geo News reported. Riyadh issued emergency alerts covering Makkah, Jeddah and Yanbu, and the Saudi foreign ministry condemned the attacks targeting Makkah and other civilian sites while affirming the kingdom’s right to defend itself.

The gathering is the first major test of the agreement, signed on August 7, under which an attack on any one party counts as an attack on all, per the Saudi ministry statement.