Iraq and the Mecca Defense Pact: Strategic neutrality or growing isolation? - Shafaq News

Shafaq News

As a new
security order takes shape across the Middle East, Iraq has stayed outside the
Mecca Joint Defense Agreement signed on August 7 by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and
Pakistan, despite sitting at the geographic center of the region the pact is
meant to defend. Baghdad’s absence raises a question its own divided political
class has yet to answer: is this deliberate neutrality, or the drift of a state
no longer able to act as a reliable partner?

The pact did
not emerge in a vacuum. It is a direct product of the war that erupted when the
United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, and of the retaliation
that followed: Saudi
territory was hit repeatedly by Iran, by the Houthis in Yemen, and by
Shia armed groups operating from Iraqi soil. That last detail moves Iraq from
the margins of this story to its center: the territory of a state professing
neutrality has already been used to strike one of the pact’s architects.

What the
three signatories built in response is a mutual-defense guarantee of unusual
weight. The agreement commits them to treat an armed attack on any one as an
attack on all —a NATO-style clause binding a top oil exporter, NATO’s
second-largest military, and the only nuclear-armed Muslim state. Together they
field roughly 1.4 million active personnel, some 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks,
and more than 340 naval assets, according to the 2026 Global Firepower Index.
Nor is the pact a one-off: it builds on the Saudi–Pakistan strategic defense
agreement signed in Riyadh in September 2025, the product of nearly a year of
negotiation.

Riyadh has
separately backed a multinational maritime initiative to protect shipping
through the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb. Iraqi
crude does not travel those routes; its exports leave through the Gulf and the
Strait of Hormuz, but the distinction only sharpens Baghdad’s exposure: the
Hormuz corridor sits squarely inside the Iran confrontation, and disruption
along any of these waterways moves the global oil price that funds the
overwhelming majority of Iraq’s budget. On none of the arrangements now forming
to protect them does Iraq hold a seat.

Iraq
confronts these arrangements from a position of institutional fragility that is
more than rhetorical. The government of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi was sworn
in on May 14 as the youngest premier in Iraq’s history and the first
non-politician to hold the office. It took power with only a partial cabinet:
parliament could not agree on the interior and defense portfolios, leaving the
country weighing whether to join a collective defense pact without a confirmed
defense minister to assess it. The symbolism is difficult to overstate.

Not everyone
reads Iraq’s absence as a failure. Amer al-Fayez, head of the Iraqi
Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee, sees no cause for alarm. “Every
agreement has its own circumstances and reasons,” he told Shafaq News,
noting that the Mecca pact concerns its three signatories, who did not invite
the wider region to join. Baghdad, in his account, can pursue security and
economic cooperation with neighbors on its own terms without binding itself to
any bloc, and prefers arrangements that lower tensions to alliances that force
it to pick a side.

Given that
Iraq maintains working ties with Iran, Turkiye, the Gulf states, and the United
States at once, joining a collective defense structure could carry consequences
well beyond the treaty text.

Political
researcher Khaled al-Ardawi argues the reality is less flattering. Iraq, he
told Shafaq News, still lacks a coherent foreign policy it can implement
consistently, leaving it in a “gray zone” of international relations.
“The Iraqi government is not fully capable of making an independent
foreign decision on political, security and defense issues without taking into
account the positions of external parties.”

He traces
the constraint to internal division, institutional weakness, corruption, and
the presence of weapons outside state control —a reference, above all, to the
Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the Iran-aligned paramilitary umbrella whose
factions the government does not fully command. Those same conditions, he
notes, make regional and major powers reluctant to sign long-term defense
agreements with Baghdad in the first place. The paradox is sharp: Iraq may
avoid alliances to preserve flexibility, yet its divisions are precisely what
deter others from treating it as a dependable partner.

Political
researcher Adel al-Ghariri locates the roots deeper in the past. The US-led
invasion of 2003, the collapse of the security system in 2014 and the rise of
ISIS, and the long contest over the shape of the state pushed Iraq away from
its Arab surroundings and hollowed out its capacity to act as a central player
in regional security. The drift toward sub-state loyalties and the spread of
arms beyond state control, he told Shafaq News, “have made Iraqi political
decision-making more complicated.” He sees possibility in the al-Zaidi
government, but frames the objective carefully: positioning Iraq between
competing regional poles rather than inside any one of them.

Turkish
analyst Jawad Gok notes that entering a collective military framework now could
drag Baghdad into conflicts it has no interest in joining, at a moment of acute
friction involving the Gulf and Iran, and Turkiye and Israel. “Iraq
currently tends toward bilateral agreements of a developmental and economic
nature rather than collective military strategies,” he said, adding that
any decision to join new security arrangements “requires time to assess
their future and whether they will serve Iraqi interests.”

Abu Bakr
al-Deeb, director of the Arab Thought Development Forum for Research, reads the
same caution as the product of overlapping US, Iranian, Turkish, and Arab
interests inside Iraq, a crowded field in which any visible tilt invites a
reaction, and in which armed factions add a further layer of sensitivity.

Non-alignment
buys diplomatic room, but al-Deeb is blunt about its price. Integrated air
defense, intelligence sharing, maritime coordination, and large-scale joint
exercises are increasingly being built without Iraq, and staying outside those
networks “risks leaving Baghdad to develop its defenses more slowly than its
neighbors, and to react to regional shifts rather than shape them.”

The cost is
not abstract in a region where security now travels with energy and trade. A
single disruption in the Red Sea or the Gulf can move oil markets within hours;
Saudi Arabia’s July agreement to supply the internationally recognized Yemeni
government with up to $150 million in oil derivatives for electricity and
essential services shows how tightly security, energy, and development have
fused. Iraq’s absence from the security layer does not exempt it from the
economic consequences.

Yet distance
is not the same as irrelevance. A recent assessment by Pakistan’s Institute of
Strategic Studies casts Iraq not as an arena for others’ competition but as a
diplomatic actor, an energy player, and a bridge across the region’s economic
map —a country whose ability to keep channels open to Tehran, the Gulf,
Washington, and Ankara at once could be turned into leverage and even a
mediating role.

What most
analysts agree on is that the choice cannot be deferred indefinitely. Al-Fayez holds that Iraq
can strike security and economic agreements based on national interest; Gok
counsels patience before committing to untested alliances. For al-Ardawi, none
of it is possible until Baghdad rebuilds its decision-making from within:
addressing the divisions, institutional weakness, corruption, and unregulated
weapons that keep partners at arm’s length. Al-Deeb offers not membership in
any bloc, but “flexible security partnerships” with Egypt, Jordan,
the Gulf states, and Turkiye across counterterrorism, border security,
cybersecurity, and energy infrastructure —cooperation that stops short of
anything that could read as aimed at a third state— paired with sustained
investment in Iraq’s own forces, air defenses, and military industries.

The
trajectory suggests the window for that kind of deliberate, à la carte
engagement is narrowing as the region’s blocs harden around it. Iraq can still
choose to make its neutrality a tool. But a state that cannot yet name its own
defense minister will struggle to persuade anyone that its absence from the
region’s new alliances is a strategy rather than a symptom, and the longer the
question goes unanswered, the more the answer is settled by others.

Written and
edited by Shafaq News staff.

Iraq and the Mecca Defense Pact: Strategic neutrality or growing isolation? – Shafaq News

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