Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sign Mecca defence pact amid regional war, Hormuz tensions

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Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Friday that Iran's armed forces had demonstrated their readiness and strength in confronting what he called the world's most expensive military, and urged Muslim countries to unite and rely on themselves in the face of "hostile outsiders".

His post on X came hours after Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed a joint defence agreement in Mecca, bringing together three Sunni Muslim US partners amid a regional conflict that has seen Iranian missile fire target Gulf oil exporters.

It was not immediately clear whether Araghchi was referring to the defence agreement in his remarks.

Turkey said on Friday that its new defence agreement with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia did not contradict its commitments to the NATO alliance.

"The agreement is not in contradiction with the commitments of Turkey's existing international alliances, including those at the heart of NATO," the government's anti-disinformation service said in a post on X.

Progress is being made between Iran and Oman on the Strait of Hormuz and "we expect a deal soon," a US official told Reuters on Friday.

Once a deal is announced to restore commercial shipping without impediments, the United States will lift its blockade of Iranian ports, the official said. "There is progress between Oman and Iran on the Strait, and we expect a deal soon," the official said.

"Once the deal is announced to restore commercial shipping without impediments, the United States will lift the blockade of Iranian ports." "As always, US actions will continue to be performance-based and tied to Iran’s implementation of its commitments," the official said. 

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi received an invitation to visit Riyadh, his office said Friday, as Tehran-backed groups announced they would delay their response to deadly US-Saudi strikes in Iraq last month.

Zaidi was supposed to visit Riyadh in late July, but the trip was cancelled due to the strikes which killed 20 militants, including five Iranians, on 29 July.

His media office said Zaidi met Saudi intelligence chief Khalid bin Ali al-Humaidan, who "conveyed a message from the Saudi leadership renewing the invitation for the prime minister to visit the Saudi capital, Riyadh".

The US-Saudi strikes came after Riyadh said its forces had intercepted drones targeting oil facilities, blaming Iran-backed groups in Iraq.

They also followed growing US pressure on Baghdad to disarm pro-Iran armed groups, which targeted US facilities hundreds of times during the Middle East war.

Zaidi, who came to power this year with Washington's blessing, vowed to ensure those groups would hand over their weapons, but has faced pushback from some powerful factions.

His government has long said it rejects the use of its territory to launch attacks on neighbouring countries.

The United States on Friday sanctioned an unlicensed multi-state cryptocurrency exchange, alleging it processed millions of dollars of crypto for Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other groups linked to the Iranian state.

The designation follows a Reuters investigation published on 31 July that identified the Dubai-based exchange, Shelbit, as the hub of a $4 billion Iranian sanctions evasion scheme. The investigation found that Shelbit moved crypto on behalf of Iran’s central bank, one of the world’s largest illegal online gambling networks, and to addresses linked by the Israeli government to the IRGC.

The US Treasury also sanctioned the expatriate Iranian who founded Shelbit and a network of other companies, Siavash Kayvanpour, for providing material support to the IRGC and Nobitex, Iran’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange. The U.S. sanctioned Nobitex on 2 June for enabling the Iranian government to circumvent Western sanctions, also after a Reuters investigation.

“Treasury will hunt down and dismantle the illicit financial networks that keep the regime afloat,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said in a statement.

Shelbit’s website had been down for months, with no way for customers to carry out transactions, but the exchange continued to process money, even during the US and Israeli war against Iran. The site reactivated the day after the Reuters investigation was published.

“Shelbit LLC categorically rejects any suggestion that the company knowingly participated in money laundering, terrorist financing, illegal gambling activity, sanctions evasion, or activity on behalf of any sanctioned, military, or governmental organization,” Shelbit said in a statement on its reactivated website on 1 August. Shelbit also said it had ceased operations in January 2026.

Yemen's Houthis said on Friday that they struck Saudi-backed forces, depots, vehicles and military equipment at the Sahn al-Jinn camp with a number of missiles and drones.

Yemen's state television said earlier on Friday that air defences shot down a number of drones launched by the Iran-aligned Houthis over Marib, east of Sanaa.

Yemen's state news agency SABA, citing local authorities in Marib, said the Houthis had launched ballistic missiles and drones at displacement camps and residential neighbourhoods in the city on Friday morning, killing two people and wounding 14 others. 

Lebanon and Israel have agreed a shortlist of countries that could send troops to verify the disarmament of Hezbollah under a US-brokered agreement, a Lebanese official said on Friday, with the United States due to pick countries from the list.

The official declined to identify any of the countries on the shortlist or say how many there were. Another Lebanese official and two foreign diplomats have previously told Reuters that Israel and the United States had vetoed France.

The list was produced during meetings between Lebanon and Israel at the US embassy in Rome this week, the latest round of talks on how to implement a 26 June deal that links Israel's progressive withdrawal of troops from Lebanon to the disarmament of ​Hezbollah, which would be "verified" by a third party.

Hezbollah is not a party to the agreement and has refused to give up its arsenal.

"We have reached a short list of countries. We decided which parties were impossible for each and set the potential actors," the Lebanese official said. "The Americans will now decide, and could pick more than one country."

There was no immediate response from Israel's foreign ministry to Reuters questions on the shortlist. When asked about the shortlist, a State Department spokesperson said the talks were "productive on the technical and expert levels" but did not provide further details.

ADNOC says 15 of its vessels have been attacked by missile and drones while transiting through the Strait of Hormuz since the beginning of the US-Israel war on Iran.

In the first Iranian reaction to the recently-signed Mecca Joint Defence Agreement by Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, a member of the Iranian Parliament's National Security Committee, said that relying on external agreements "will not serve as a safety valve for Riyadh".

Ebrahim Rezeai also said: "The Saudis must realise that an agreement on paper with Turkey and Pakistan will not bring the security, just as years of unilaterally hosting the Americans failed to provide it."
"Reform your policies so that you do not have to beg others for security".

Israeli forces have carried out a massive explosion Friday afternoon in the vicinity of Al-Saha Mosque in the town of Zawtar al-Sharqiya, Lebanon's National News Agency (NNA) reported.

Turkey insisted on Friday that its joint defence pact signed with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan amid the US-Iran war was "not aimed at any particular country".

"The Mecca Agreement, which is not aimed at any particular country, will strengthen the shared security and collective deterrence of the three nations... thereby making significant contributions to the preservation of peace and stability in our region," Burhanettin Duran, the Turkish presidency's communications director, posted on X.