Shafaq News<\/p>\n
As a new
\nsecurity order takes shape across the Middle East, Iraq has stayed outside the
\nMecca Joint Defense Agreement signed on August 7 by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and
\nPakistan, despite sitting at the geographic center of the region the pact is
\nmeant to defend. Baghdad’s absence raises a question its own divided political
\nclass has yet to answer: is this deliberate neutrality, or the drift of a state
\nno longer able to act as a reliable partner?<\/p>\n
The pact did
\nnot emerge in a vacuum. It is a direct product of the war that erupted when the
\nUnited States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, and of the retaliation
\nthat followed: Saudi
\nterritory was hit repeatedly by Iran, by the Houthis in Yemen, and by
\nShia armed groups operating from Iraqi soil. That last detail moves Iraq from
\nthe margins of this story to its center: the territory of a state professing
\nneutrality has already been used to strike one of the pact’s architects.<\/p>\n
Read more:38 years on: Iraq still divided over Iran war victory anniversary<\/a><\/p>\n What the Riyadh has Iraq Not everyone Given that Political He traces Read more: Days to disarm Iraq’s factions: deadline or negotiable ceiling?<\/a><\/p>\n Political Turkish Read more: Iraq under regional pressure as neighbors threaten to strike Iran-aligned factions<\/a><\/p>\n Abu Bakr Non-alignment The cost is Yet distance
\nthree signatories built in response is a mutual-defense guarantee of unusual
\nweight. The agreement commits them to treat an armed attack on any one as an
\nattack on all \u2014a NATO-style clause binding a top oil exporter, NATO’s
\nsecond-largest military, and the only nuclear-armed Muslim state. Together they
\nfield roughly 1.4 million active personnel, some 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks,
\nand more than 340 naval assets, according to the 2026 Global Firepower Index.
\nNor is the pact a one-off: it builds on the Saudi\u2013Pakistan strategic defense
\nagreement signed in Riyadh in September 2025, the product of nearly a year of
\nnegotiation. <\/p>\n
\nseparately backed a multinational maritime initiative to protect shipping
\nthrough the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb. Iraqi
\ncrude does not travel those routes; its exports leave through the Gulf and the
\nStrait of Hormuz, but the distinction only sharpens Baghdad’s exposure: the
\nHormuz corridor sits squarely inside the Iran confrontation, and disruption
\nalong any of these waterways moves the global oil price that funds the
\noverwhelming majority of Iraq’s budget. On none of the arrangements now forming
\nto protect them does Iraq hold a seat.<\/p>\n
\nconfronts these arrangements from a position of institutional fragility that is
\nmore than rhetorical. The government of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi was sworn
\nin on May 14 as the youngest premier in Iraq’s history and the first
\nnon-politician to hold the office. It took power with only a partial cabinet:
\nparliament could not agree on the interior and defense portfolios, leaving the
\ncountry weighing whether to join a collective defense pact without a confirmed
\ndefense minister to assess it. The symbolism is difficult to overstate.<\/p>\n
\nreads Iraq’s absence as a failure. Amer al-Fayez, head of the Iraqi
\nParliament’s Foreign Relations Committee, sees no cause for alarm. “Every
\nagreement has its own circumstances and reasons,” he told Shafaq News,
\nnoting that the Mecca<\/a> pact concerns its three signatories, who did not invite
\nthe wider region to join. Baghdad, in his account, can pursue security and
\neconomic cooperation with neighbors on its own terms without binding itself to
\nany bloc, and prefers arrangements that lower tensions to alliances that force
\nit to pick a side. <\/p>\n
\nIraq maintains working ties with Iran, Turkiye, the Gulf states, and the United
\nStates at once, joining a collective defense structure could carry consequences
\nwell beyond the treaty text.<\/p>\n
\nresearcher Khaled al-Ardawi argues the reality is less flattering. Iraq, he
\ntold Shafaq News, still lacks a coherent foreign policy it can implement
\nconsistently, leaving it in a “gray zone” of international relations.
\n“The Iraqi government is not fully capable of making an independent
\nforeign decision on political, security and defense issues without taking into
\naccount the positions of external parties.”<\/p>\n
\nthe constraint to internal division, institutional weakness, corruption, and
\nthe presence of weapons outside state control \u2014a reference, above all, to the
\nPopular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the Iran-aligned paramilitary umbrella whose
\nfactions the government does not fully command. Those same conditions, he
\nnotes, make regional and major powers reluctant to sign long-term defense
\nagreements with Baghdad in the first place. The paradox is sharp: Iraq may
\navoid alliances to preserve flexibility, yet its divisions are precisely what
\ndeter others from treating it as a dependable partner.<\/p>\n
\nresearcher Adel al-Ghariri locates the roots deeper in the past. The US-led
\ninvasion of 2003, the collapse of the security system in 2014 and the rise of
\nISIS, and the long contest over the shape of the state pushed Iraq away from
\nits Arab surroundings and hollowed out its capacity to act as a central player
\nin regional security. The drift toward sub-state loyalties and the spread of
\narms beyond state control, he told Shafaq News, “have made Iraqi political
\ndecision-making more complicated.” He sees possibility in the al-Zaidi
\ngovernment, but frames the objective carefully: positioning Iraq between
\ncompeting regional poles rather than inside any one of them.<\/p>\n
\nanalyst Jawad Gok notes that entering a collective military framework now could
\ndrag Baghdad into conflicts it has no interest in joining, at a moment of acute
\nfriction involving the Gulf and Iran, and Turkiye and Israel. “Iraq
\ncurrently tends toward bilateral agreements of a developmental and economic
\nnature rather than collective military strategies,” he said, adding that
\nany decision to join new security arrangements “requires time to assess
\ntheir future and whether they will serve Iraqi interests.”<\/p>\n
\nal-Deeb, director of the Arab Thought Development Forum for Research, reads the
\nsame caution as the product of overlapping US, Iranian, Turkish, and Arab
\ninterests inside Iraq, a crowded field in which any visible tilt invites a
\nreaction, and in which armed factions add a further layer of sensitivity.<\/p>\n
\nbuys diplomatic room, but al-Deeb is blunt about its price. Integrated air
\ndefense, intelligence sharing, maritime coordination, and large-scale joint
\nexercises are increasingly being built without Iraq, and staying outside those
\nnetworks \u201crisks leaving Baghdad to develop its defenses more slowly than its
\nneighbors, and to react to regional shifts rather than shape them.\u201d <\/p>\n
\nnot abstract in a region where security now travels with energy and trade. A
\nsingle disruption in the Red Sea or the Gulf can move oil markets within hours;
\nSaudi Arabia’s July agreement to supply the internationally recognized Yemeni
\ngovernment with up to $150 million in oil derivatives for electricity and
\nessential services shows how tightly security, energy, and development have
\nfused. Iraq’s absence from the security layer does not exempt it from the
\neconomic consequences.<\/p>\n
\nis not the same as irrelevance. A recent assessment by Pakistan’s Institute of
\nStrategic Studies casts Iraq not as an arena for others’ competition but as a
\ndiplomatic actor, an energy player, and a bridge across the region’s economic
\nmap \u2014a country whose ability to keep channels open to Tehran, the Gulf,
\nWashington, and Ankara at once could be turned into leverage and even a
\nmediating role.<\/p>\n