By Dure Akram
When Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani touched down in Pakistan on August 19, he did something far more consequential and penetrating than spelling an end to a 19-year gap in high-level diplomacy between Damascus and Islamabad. He publicly acknowledged that Syria was studying whether to join the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement linking Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye.
“We understand that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Türkiye are very important countries in the region,” Shaibani said. “We are studying our options.”
As of now, Damascus has made no decision. That Bangladesh is also considering its next step is only part of the story. However, what’s going down in Syria is much more profound.
Less than two years after Bashar al-Assad’s fall, the new Syrian government seems to be searching for security without recreating the very dependence from which it has just emerged. Türkiye is indispensable along a border stretching more than 1,000 kilometers. Saudi Arabia offers investment, Arab political weight, and access to the Gulf. Washington has, meanwhile, become an interlocutor between Damascus and Israel. Russia has not disappeared altogether. Relations with Iran remain badly damaged, but diplomacy has not been permanently ruled out.
And now there is Pakistan.
Shaibani himself offered perhaps the clearest clue to Damascus’s intentions when he told journalists in Islamabad, “We have come to expand relations with Pakistan, not to restore them.”
The distinction is important as it goes far beyond nostalgia for an old friendship. Damascus appears to be calculating what Pakistan can contribute to the construction of a new Syrian state.
Syria’s security problem is no longer theoretical.
The question became particularly urgent on August 18, when Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur military airbase in northwestern Syria. Eight strikes hit the runway and storage facilities. Israel’s justification centered on fears that Türkiye might establish a military presence there, while Ankara denied having forces deployed at the base. US envoy Tom Barrack posted on social media, “The confirmed Israeli airstrikes on Abu al-Duhur Air Base constitute an unnecessary escalation that does not advance regional stability.”
Pakistan condemned the strike the next day, before Shaibani’s substantive meetings in Islamabad, calling it a violation of international law and reaffirming support for Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity.
While Shaibani’s Pakistan visit was already planned, the strike exposed precisely the strategic dilemma his government is trying to solve.
Israel is not simply striking Syrian assets. It is attempting to influence the limits within which Syrian military power may be reconstructed: what capabilities Damascus can acquire, which foreign states may help build them, and, increasingly, how far Türkiye’s role inside Syria can extend.
For Damascus, therefore, sovereignty is becoming inseparable from the ability to choose its partners.
Shaibani made that point explicitly. Syria, he said, was a sovereign state, and Israel could not determine its alliances or partnerships.
Yet Damascus is also trying to avoid a war.
Within days of the Pakistan visit, Shaibani and Israeli intelligence chief Roman Gofman were involved in fresh US-mediated talks in Jordan held on August 23. According to Syrian media, the discussions addressed mechanisms to halt Israeli strikes, revive negotiations over a security arrangement, and prevent Israel-Türkiye tensions from being fought out on Syrian territory.
This is the crucial feature of Syria’s emerging strategy. Damascus is pursuing deterrence and diplomacy at the same time.
It is talking to Israel while building relations with the countries Israel worries may strengthen Syria.
That is not necessarily contradictory. A government negotiating while its military facilities can be struck almost at will is negotiating from weakness. Damascus appears to be trying to change the balance surrounding the negotiations without abandoning them.
Why Pakistan, one may ask?
Pakistan cannot become an overnight guarantor of security in Syria, and there is little reason for Damascus to want it to.
Türkiye has a geostrategic location, military access, an advanced defense industry, and years of hands-down, on-the-ground experience with Syrian affairs. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, offers the economic weight required for reconstruction on a scale Islamabad cannot match.
Pakistan’s attraction lies somewhere else.
It is militarily capable but has no territorial claim in Syria, no military occupation there, and no Syrian proxy network to protect. It maintains exceptionally close defense relations with both Türkiye and Saudi Arabia but also retains channels with Tehran and Washington. It has decades of experience training foreign military personnel and building security relationships with Gulf states without necessarily acquiring political control over them.
The military element of Shaibani’s trip was also more substantial than the diplomatic communiqués alone might suggest. At General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, he met Pakistan’s army chief and Chief of Defense Forces Field Marshal Asim Munir. According to sources in Pakistan’s military, the discussion covered the regional security environment and avenues for enhanced bilateral defense and security cooperation, with both sides agreeing to expand engagement in those fields.
Even if no weapons agreement was announced and no Pakistani deployment to Syria was disclosed, it is hard to make light of the fact that a Syrian foreign minister rebuilding his country’s diplomatic relationships did not restrict himself to Pakistan’s civilian leadership. Defense cooperation went directly onto the agenda with the official who sits at the center of Pakistan’s external military partnerships.
The relationship is also acquiring institutional scaffolding. Syria and Pakistan agreed to work toward restoring ambassador-level representation, reviving the Joint Ministerial Commission and direct flights, establishing a Pakistan-Syria Joint Business Council, and organizing an investment forum in Damascus. Shaibani told Pakistan’s commerce minister that a Syrian economic delegation would travel to Pakistan, while Islamabad said it was willing to explore sending a trade delegation in the other direction.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has also invited President Ahmed al-Sharaa to Pakistan and explicitly reaffirmed Islamabad’s support for Syria’s claim to the occupied Golan Heights.
That positions Pakistan politically close to Damascus without requiring Islamabad to become another actor physically embedded in Syria.
Contrary to what some media sources may have us believe, Pakistani analysts studying the Makkah pact have generally been more cautious than the language of “Islamic NATO” suggests. Rabia Akhtar, a Pakistani nuclear and strategic-affairs scholar associated with Harvard’s Belfer Centre, argues that the pact is better understood as security cooperation among middle powers seeking stronger partnerships without surrendering strategic autonomy.
Her formulation is particularly useful when applied to Syria.
The attraction for Damascus may not be an automatic Article 5-style guarantee at all. It may be access to overlapping military capabilities, political backing, and deterrent uncertainty without the rigidities of a conventional alliance.
Another security analyst, Muhammad Faisal, makes a related point as he argues that the pact’s value lies in creating uncertainty for potential adversaries and strengthening collective deterrence rather than writing fixed Western-style military obligations into advance commitments.
Syria would test that ambiguity as no other prospective member could.
Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan can declare that an attack against one will be considered an attack against all. But Syria is already subjected to Israeli strikes.
If Damascus eventually joined and Israel struck another Syrian military installation, what precisely would collective defense require?
Pakistani intelligence assistance? Turkish air-defense support? Saudi diplomatic and economic pressure? Joint military planning? Or actual military retaliation?
Nothing publicly available suggests that all three states would automatically be required to enter a war.
That flexibility is not necessarily a weakness.
The agreement could perhaps be defined as an alignment that provides members with additional defense options and resources rather than replacing their existing capabilities. Speaking from Syria’s vantage point, additional options may be exactly the point. A defense network can alter an adversary’s calculations long before it fires a shot.
But Damascus would also create a problem for the agreement’s founders. Syrian accession could import the unresolved Golan dispute, Israeli military action, and increasingly dangerous Türkiye-Israel competition directly into a pact whose operational thresholds remain intentionally indistinct.
That may explain why both Damascus and the founders have reason to move carefully.
There is another reason to resist interpreting the Islamabad visit as Syria simply joining an anti-Iranian camp.
Only days after receiving Shaibani at GHQ, Field Marshal Munir is due in Tehran. His visit is said to center around regional security, Iran-US diplomacy, and the new Pakistan-Saudi-Türkiye agreement.
To see the military chief discussing future defense cooperation with the foreign minister of a Syrian government that remains deeply hostile to Iran’s role under Assad and then make plans for a visit in Tehran to discuss the very regional architecture Syria is considering entering
is the best measure of Pakistan’s emerging Middle Eastern importance than sweeping claims about Islamabad becoming a new regional superpower.
Pakistan’s advantage lies not in choosing every side. It lies in retaining access to sides that increasingly struggle to speak to one another.
Earlier this year, Pakistan tried its hand at mediating between Washington and Tehran. It simultaneously deepened its longstanding Saudi defense relationship and institutionalized cooperation with Türkiye.
Shaibani was unequivocal about Iran’s past role in Syria, saying Tehran would need to confront what it had done during the previous 14 years before genuinely normal relations could resume. But he did not permanently close the diplomatic door.
“Diplomacy has no limits,” he said.
That creates a potentially important long-term role for Islamabad.
Pakistan could eventually become useful not because Syria wants Pakistan to choose Damascus over Tehran, but because Islamabad can maintain relationships with both.
It goes without saying that the temptation is to describe the transformation as an Iranian withdrawal followed by a Turkish-Saudi-Pakistani advance. Yet, that would be too simple. Damascus has renegotiated aspects of Moscow’s military position rather than immediately eliminating it, while seeking new relationships with states that spent years on the opposite side of the Syrian conflict.
A revealing Syrian perspective comes from Zaher Badrani, writing for the Syrian Future Movement, after Shaibani’s Islamabad trip. His warning was explicit: “We do not want to replace one axis with another.”
Instead, he argued that Syria could connect Turkish military and technological expertise, Saudi economic weight, and Pakistani defense, and scientific and technological capabilities while preserving independent Syrian decision-making.
His most interesting insight concerned deterrence itself: a country dependent on one protector becomes subordinate to that protector; a country whose stability matters to many outside powers makes aggression against it costly for many capitals.