Pakistan and Turkey will send help to Saudi Arabia but are unlikely to fight Houthi rebels

Within two months of it being signed, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan invoked the Mecca mutual defence pact in response to attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebel forces.

The three countries agreed on October 5 to activate what Saudi defence minister Khalid bin Salman called collective deterrence measures against the Houthis. Islamabad and Ankara have undertaken to provide “agreed military forces and capabilities” and ensure their rapid deployment to the kingdom.

The same day this agreement was struck, Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces opened a counteroffensive, supported by 100 Saudi-led coalition jets from Arab and regional states, to push the Houthis back from the Bab al-Mandab, the strait they seized in September.

For a month it had looked as if the pact may turn out to be a hollow promise. Islamabad and Ankara issued messages of condemnation after a string of Houthi rebel attacks on the kingdom, but did little else. Analysts were talking of the alliance as a stress test for the alliance. And the question was whether Pakistan and Turkey would fail the test. So the two countries’ decision to deploy troops means that pact has now passed that stress test – but in the narrowest sense. Its members have turned up. But what they brought a shield, rather than a sword.

Pakistan’s defence...

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