ISTANBUL: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday he hoped more countries would join a defence agreement signed last week between Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan aimed at stabilising a region wracked by conflict. "Our vision for it is not limited to the three countries," the Turkish leader told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat daily. "Rather we aspire for it to grow, and perhaps appropriate conditions will emerge one day for all countries of the region to gather under its umbrella."
Erdogan said the pact emerged out of the "new circumstances" in the Middle East with regional players seeking to assume greater responsibility for their own security and stability. "Regional issues should be resolved by regional actors, and with this action, we consider that we have taken a first step toward achieving that goal," he said. "Resolving regional issues must be carried out away from formulas imposed from the outside. We know very well that solutions imported from abroad only bring disasters," he told the Saudi-owned newspaper.
The pact, which consolidates three major US allies into an alternative security architecture that rejects Israel's hegemony, seeks to boost security cooperation, while also opening the way for "developing joint projects in the defence industries", Erdogan said. Since the onset of the war, Saudi Arabia has grown closer to Türkiye, with whom it previously had fraught ties, with Erdogan saying Ankara and Riyadh would "take steps that will elevate relations between the two countries to much higher levels". — AFP
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