Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan will hold an urgent, high-level meeting under a joint defence pact to discuss ways to support the kingdom amid attacks by Yemen’s Houthis, while Saudi’s top religious authority told troops to be ready to lay down their lives to fight their Iran-aligned enemy.
The Houthis have launched strikes on the government in Yemen and repeatedly fired into Saudi Arabia, disrupting oil flows from the world’s largest energy exporter, as part of a wider Middle East war that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February.
The Houthis said they had fired dozens of missiles and drones at Saudi targets on Thursday, while authorities in Saudi Arabia said they had intercepted six ballistic missiles fired by Houthi fighters.
Saudi Arabia earlier had issued emergency alerts for areas including the holy city of Mecca, Jeddah and Yanbu, the main Saudi Red Sea oil port.
Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, the kingdom’s top religious authority, called on soldiers to be ready to lay down their lives to fight the Houthis until the group is ousted from power, according to a statement posted by the Saudi state news agency late on Thursday.
Amid the fighting, the Saudi, Pakistani and Turkish foreign ministers met within the framework of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, according to a Saudi foreign ministry statement. They condemned the attacks targeting Mecca and other civilian sites, while affirming Saudi Arabia’s right to defend itself, the statement said.
“The ministers also discussed arrangements for holding an urgent meeting of the chiefs of staff of the three countries to discuss ways to support Saudi Arabia under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, which stipulates that an attack against any one of the parties constitutes an attack against all parties,” the statement said.
The meeting was announced shortly after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian sought to distance Iran from the Houthis in an American television interview on Thursday.
“The Houthis are responsible for their own actions,” Pezeshkian told the Fox News programme “Special Report with Bret Baier” a day after he appeared before the UN General Assembly in New York.
