Six to seven Muslim-majority countries want to join the Mecca Defense Agreement, a mutual-defense pact signed earlier this year by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Senior diplomats from the three founding states recently met in Istanbul to discuss security and military cooperation. Bangladesh is identified as a concrete candidate, and Egypt has been mentioned as weighing whether to sign on.
Pakistan’s foreign minister said officials are working on a formal framework to make it easier for additional countries to join, though he did not name most of them. Turkey’s foreign minister stated that the pact was designed with expansion in mind, but cautioned that admitting new members requires working out specific conditions, procedures, and shared standards first. Officials stress that no new member has been formally admitted yet.
Signed in early August, the Mecca Agreement commits the founding members to treat an armed attack on one as an attack on all three, modeled on NATO’s Article 5. The pact emerged amid regional instability, including the Israel-Iran conflict and turmoil tied to the Iran war, as an attempt to build a collective security umbrella independent of Western guarantees.