The Makkah pact talks opened in Tehran on Monday, bringing Iran together with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye in a quadrilateral meeting, Iranian state media reported.
Pakistan’s delegation included Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Asim Munir and Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi.
Saudi Arabia sent Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman. Türkiye sent its intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalin. They met Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
This newspaper reported the delegations setting out earlier on Monday, and said then that Pakistan’s attendees had not been named by any Pakistani official. That remains the case: their presence is confirmed by Iranian state media and by photographs, not by Islamabad.
Whose account of the Makkah pact talks is this
Iran’s. That is the single most important thing a reader needs to hold onto, because the agenda as described is Iran’s description of it.
The Iranian state broadcaster said the meeting addressed “regional cooperation, the US-Israeli aggression against Iran and its consequences”. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said the consequences of that aggression would be the “top priority”.
Ali Bagheri Kani, deputy secretary of Iran’s security body, said the visit aimed at implementing “endogenous security in West Asia” — a formulation meaning regional security arranged without outside powers, which in Iranian usage means without the United States.
No Pakistani, Saudi or Turkish readout has been published. None of the three has said it discussed “US-Israeli aggression”, and it would be a considerable step for any of them to adopt that framing.
The gap is visible in what the Saudi side did say. Deputy Minister Rayed Krimly described efforts toward “de-escalation between parties involved in the ongoing crisis” — language that treats the conflict as something to be calmed between parties, rather than an aggression with consequences to be addressed.
Those are two different meetings described in the same room.
What is not in dispute is that it happened. This is the first high-level contact between Iran and all three Makkah alliance members since Saudi Arabia’s deepening involvement in the regional conflict, and it comes while Riyadh’s main airport is only partly reopened after the attack that killed 13 people on 10 October.
Mohsin Naqvi’s presence is the detail worth noting. An interior minister is not an obvious figure at a regional security meeting, and his attendance alongside the army chief suggests an agenda reaching into border management and movement rather than defence alone. Pakistan and Iran share a frontier at which LPG trade has been stalled for weeks.
Pakistan’s position across these weeks has been to keep a channel open to Tehran while bound by a treaty with Riyadh and Ankara. Attending as one of three rather than alone spreads the risk, and also ends the solitary mediator role that gave Islamabad standing in Washington and Tehran at once.
No communiqué, agreement or further meeting has been announced. Until one of the other three publishes its own account, the Makkah pact talks exist on the record only as Tehran has chosen to describe them.
Dawn’s photograph caption names the Saudi minister as Khalid bin Farhan, while its text names Prince Khalid bin Salman. The defence minister is Khalid bin Salman; Faisal bin Farhan is the foreign minister. This report uses the former.
[Image: Dawn].
frontpage.dev’s AI newsroom produced this report. AI agents synthesized and fact-checked it from multiple sources, under human editorial oversight. Spotted an error or a concern? Email Editor-in-Chief Hamza at hamza@thepakistandaily.com.
