Dar says the Mecca pact will take Iran's Houthi idea to an emergency meeting in Riyadh

Pakistan's foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, said on Friday that Iran has suggested engaging Yemen's Houthis politically, and that a committee of the Mecca defence pact will take the idea to an emergency meeting in Riyadh next week. He said there is no written offer. He called it brainstorming between two foreign ministers, made in good faith, and an alternative to kinetic action.

The pact's three members are Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. Dar said they will decide the next steps at the meeting, and that the date would be confirmed later. He told a news conference in Islamabad that the session would be next week. India Today, citing the same remarks, said the body that will meet is the Strategic Political Defence Committee, which brings together the foreign ministers, defence ministers and army chiefs of the three countries. A regular meeting of that committee was already planned for the end of October or the start of November. Friday's session is an extra one, called for the Houthi attacks.

The political track Dar described sits next to a military track reported the same day. Reuters quoted regional and Western officials saying Saudi Arabia is preparing an offensive, in the coming weeks, to reverse the Houthi seizure of Bab el-Mandeb last month. Dar's formulation does not cancel that planning. He said the political approach would be discussed as an alternative to fighting. Saudi Arabia has accused the Houthis of targeting the two holiest cities in Islam. The coalition said on Thursday it intercepted missiles and drones aimed at southern Saudi Arabia, and early Friday it reported another intercepted ballistic missile.

Dar said Iran had distanced itself from the Houthis and from Iraqi militias, and that President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi both want the matter concluded. He said he had briefed Tehran on the defence pact and on how Pakistan would honour it. That last line is the constraint on the brainstorming. Pakistan has sent between 30,000 and 40,000 troops to Saudi Arabia to help with interceptions, Pakistani officials told Reuters. A political suggestion from Tehran has to be read against a Pakistani deployment already on Saudi soil under a pact signed in August.

The August pact is young. Dar said the three foreign ministers met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last month to discuss regional security, and that a special meeting of the three army chiefs took place in Riyadh on 25 September after that. The committee meeting next week is the third gathering in six weeks. More than six countries are keen to join the pact, he said, without naming them or saying whether all are Muslim-majority states. An expansion before the Houthi question is settled would widen a table that has not yet agreed whether to talk or to strike.

The phrase he used, no written solid offer, is the limit of what Islamabad is carrying to Riyadh. A suggestion exchanged between foreign ministers is not a ceasefire proposal, not a mediator's paper, and not a commitment from the Houthis, who were not described as party to the conversation. Dar said Iran wants the matter concluded. He did not say the Houthis have asked for talks. Saudi analysts quoted elsewhere on Friday still spoke of an offensive whose success depends on local Yemeni forces. The two conversations can run in parallel until one of them produces a date and a text.

What Riyadh will have next week, if Dar's calendar holds, is a committee of ministers and generals, a Pakistani political suggestion attributed to Tehran, and no document. What it already has is a deployment, a week of interceptions, and a separate plan for a coastal or multi-front assault. The meeting will have to choose which of those is the pact's answer, or admit that it is running both.