At Al-Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, prime minister, and Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif sign the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement. The date of the instrument is 17 September 2025. It is not the Mecca Defence Alliance of August 2026, which also brings in Turkey.

The state visit falls on 25/3/1447 AH. King Salman remains Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques; Pakistan’s greeting is conveyed at the opening of the talks. The joint statement, issued by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Saudi Press Agency, is the public text. The body of the agreement has not been released.

According to the statement, the agreement aims to develop defence cooperation and to strengthen joint deterrence against any aggression. The operative sentence: any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both. The working language of the instrument, according to reports, is English.

The military partnership does not begin here: Pakistani troops stood on Saudi frontiers as early as the 1960s, and Riyadh has for decades sent officers to train in Pakistan. The signing comes eight days after the Israeli airstrike of 9 September on Doha and after the extraordinary Arab–Islamic summit there. The statement does not name Israel.

The text remains confidential. A Saudi official told Reuters that it is a comprehensive defensive agreement covering all military means, without mentioning nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Asif, then suggested and later retracted a nuclear umbrella. Neither the statement nor SPA records one.

Pakistan’s federal cabinet ratifies on 9 October, in Islamabad, with Shehbaz in the chair. Troop numbers, squadrons and batteries in later reports do not stand in the September statement; they are not published clauses of the instrument.

In August 2026, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey sign in Mecca a trilateral pact that restates the formula “an attack on one is an attack on all”. That is not the agreement at Al-Yamamah. The 17 September agreement remains bilateral, between Riyadh and Islamabad.

It is not Mecca 2026, and it is not a published nuclear-umbrella article. The signatures at Al-Yamamah are Mohammed bin Salman’s and Shehbaz Sharif’s, on a text whose body remains, outside the statement, unpublished.

Image: Mohammed bin Salman receives Joseph Aoun at Al-Yamamah Palace, 4 March 2025; Saudi Press Agency; CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement. Treaty text: Joint Statement on the State Visit of Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, 17 September 2025.