ANKARA, Aug 13 (Reuters) – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan will group senior ministers, hold joint exercises and deepen defence industry cooperation under \u200ca military pact signed between the regional powers last week, Turkey’s \u200cdefence ministry said on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The three Sunni Muslim U.S. allies, alarmed by a regional conflagration that \u200bhas brought Iranian missile fire onto Gulf oil exporters, signed the “Mecca Joint Defence Agreement” on August 7. They said the accord stipulates that an armed attack against any member would be regarded as an attack on all, similar to NATO’s Article \u200c5 collective defence clause.<\/p>\n
At a \u2060weekly briefing in Ankara, the defence ministry said the pact’s fundamental goal was to ensure defence and military ties were \u2060put on a “more institutional and sustainable” footing.<\/p>\n
“Under the accord, strategic political and military mechanisms plan to be established involving the Defence Ministers, Foreign Ministers, and Chiefs of \u200bGeneral Staff\/Armed \u200bForces Commanders, and that coordination among the \u200bthree countries will be conducted at \u200cthe highest level,” it said.<\/p>\n
The ministry added that joint military exercises involving land, naval, and air forces, as well as air defence and unmanned systems were planned, in addition to deeper defence industry cooperation.<\/p>\n
“The aim is to provide not only product and system supply, but also joint development and production, technology \u200ccooperation, and sustainable maintenance and logistics support,” \u200bit said, adding that unmanned and autonomous systems, \u200belectronic warfare and artificial intelligence \u200bcapabilities would be prioritised.<\/p>\n
Turkey, which has NATO’s second-largest army, has \u200csaid the pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan \u200band top oil exporter \u200bSaudi Arabia was open to expansion \u2014 with Egypt as a potential candidate \u2014 and did not seek to replace any existing alliances.<\/p>\n
The ministry also \u200bsaid Turkey was participating \u200cin meetings in Jeddah aimed at establishing an international coalition to protect \u200bRed Sea shipping.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu, Editing by Huseyin Hayatsever \u200band Ece Toksabay; Editing by Aidan Lewis)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ANKARA, Aug 13 (Reuters) – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan will group senior ministers, hold joint exercises and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14,1302,4039,4041,4040,1943,4042,2747,95],"class_list":["post-6555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-defence-industry","tag-defence-ministry","tag-industry-cooperation","tag-military-exercises","tag-military-pact","tag-pakistan","tag-regional-powers","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/defence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}