Turkey will submit a mandate to its parliament to deploy military personnel to Saudi Arabia under the three-nation defence pact signed in Mecca in August, a lawmaker from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling AK Party told Reuters on Wednesday, the next step in turning a paper alliance into soldiers and air defenses on the ground.
The mandate follows the ratification bill Turkey submitted to parliament on Tuesday for the Joint Defence Pact, which Erdoğan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed in Makkah on August 7. The agreement binds the three countries to treat an armed attack on one member as an attack on all three, and the Turkish lawmaker, speaking anonymously, said the first deployments would have no offensive role: technical personnel, along with experts in air defence and electronic warfare, are expected to go first.
An armed attack on one member will be treated as an attack on all three.
Turkish officials have been careful to define what the pact is not. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said it is not an offensive agreement and that Turkey would not send troops to attack another country — its purpose is collective defence when a member is attacked. Turkey is not starting from zero in the kingdom: Turkish technical teams, air-defence systems and electronic-warfare equipment are already in Saudi Arabia under a 2010 training-cooperation agreement, and officials have indicated that any wider contribution could take the form of equipment, intelligence sharing and weapons systems as much as manpower. Turkey has also joined a Saudi-led coalition initiative to protect navigation in the Red Sea.
The machinery is now moving in Ankara. Parliament Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş is expected to refer the mandate to the foreign affairs commission this week, and the Defence Ministry said at an October 15 briefing that any deployment requires parliament's approval, with the size of any force depending on Saudi Arabia's requests, the conditions on the ground and the final agreement.
The reason for the urgency is the war that has been closing in on the kingdom. At an emergency meeting in Riyadh on October 5, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan agreed to activate their commitments and deploy forces rapidly after strikes on Saudi territory, and on October 10 an attack on Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport killed at least 12 people and wounded more than 300. Britain announced on Tuesday that RAF Typhoons will fly defensive patrols over Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan sent jets to support Saudi air defence as far back as April.
Ankara's move means the region's powers are increasingly organizing their own collective defence, in a realignment that officials in Washington and Tehran are both watching closely.