Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a collective-defence treaty on 7 August. Long before the ink was dry, all three were already backing the same side in Africa’s largest war — against another Gulf power.
When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on 7 August, its collective-defence provisions were framed around attacks on the three signatories. Yet on the very same day, analysts were tracing Pakistani weapons in the hands of Sudan’s army. In that sense, the new alliance does not need to wait for its first conflict. Its members are already deeply entangled in one.
Sudan, now in the fourth year of a devastating civil war, has emerged as one of the clearest arenas of competition between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have all aligned themselves, to varying degrees, with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). On the other side, the United Arab Emirates has been widely accused of supporting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). This alignment did not begin with the Mecca agreement. It had been taking shape for years.
Turkey has arguably made the most consequential military contribution. Contract documents examined by investigators indicate that Baykar supplied the SAF with at least eight Bayraktar TB2 drones, three ground-control stations and around 600 warheads, in a package valued at roughly $120 million. Akıncı heavy drones and Turkish technical personnel have also reportedly entered the equation.
The political relationship has developed in parallel. Erdoğan hosted Burhan in Ankara on 2 June, presenting Turkey’s involvement through the language of Sudanese sovereignty and territorial integrity. Satellite imagery, meanwhile, has identified Akıncı airframes at East Oweinat in southern Egypt, a location linked to drone operations into Sudan.
Saudi Arabia followed a more complicated path, moving from mediator towards material support and then, apparently, pulling back. Riyadh had hosted the Jeddah Declaration in May 2023, an early attempt to establish humanitarian commitments between the warring parties. It later helped broker a Pakistani arms package for Khartoum reportedly worth $1.5 billion. The proposed deal included K-8 light attack aircraft, more than 200 drones, air-defence systems and, according to reports, JF-17 fighter aircraft.
Intelligence Online reported in February that Saudi support had gone further, including M777 howitzers and operational training. But after a March meeting in Riyadh, the kingdom reportedly withdrew its financing.
Islamabad shelved the package in April. The story, however, did not end there. Pakistani-made hardware has since appeared on the Kordofan front. Leena Badri of the Tahrir Institute has interpreted its presence as a sign of the SAF’s confidence that its foreign support remains intact.
That leaves an important unanswered question: did Riyadh quietly revive at least part of the arrangement, or did Khartoum secure the equipment through another channel?
Across the battlefield stands the Emirati network. In February, the UN fact-finding mission concluded that the RSF’s capture of El Fasher bore the hallmarks of genocide. Human Rights Watch has documented the role of Colombian contractors reportedly trained at bases in the UAE before being deployed to Darfur. The European Parliament has also identified Abu Dhabi as the RSF’s principal external sponsor. Relations between the two sides have deteriorated to the point that Sudan severed diplomatic ties with the Emirates in May 2025.
None of this means that the Mecca agreement formally extends to Sudan. It does not. Its Article 5-style collective-defence provision concerns attacks against the signatories themselves, and its architects insist that the pact is not directed against any particular country.
But alliances are about more than treaty language. They institutionalise relationships that often already exist.
By the time the Mecca agreement was signed, its three members had already converged on the same side of a major African war. Across from them was a Gulf power whose regional interests increasingly diverge from Riyadh’s — a rivalry made more visible by Saudi Arabia’s public criticism of the UAE over Yemen in December.
For Sudanese civilians, these geopolitical alignments are anything but abstract. Around 33.7 million people are estimated to need humanitarian assistance this year, while approximately 13.6 million have been displaced. UN figures indicate that drones accounted for more than 80 per cent of recorded civilian deaths during the first four months of 2026, killing at least 880 people. On 2 August alone, an army drone strike on a traditional court in North Darfur killed 35.
The significance of Sudan therefore extends well beyond another episode in the country’s long war. It offers an early glimpse of what the emerging Mecca alignment may look like in practice: not necessarily a formal joint intervention, but overlapping military relationships, arms transfers, intelligence ties and strategic interests reinforcing the same partner.
Hakan Fidan has already suggested that the pact need not remain a three-member arrangement. Egypt, which has its own close relationship with Burhan and is already linked to the infrastructure supporting drone operations into Sudan, would be an obvious candidate for any wider alignment.
Sudan may therefore be the first real test of the bloc taking shape around Ankara, Riyadh and Islamabad. Not because the Mecca treaty obliges its members to fight there, but because they were already moving in the same direction before they signed it.
The pact’s first battlefield may not be in the Gulf at all. It may already be in Sudan.