Saudi Arabia is reportedly seeking the kind of Turkish military presence it refused nine years ago. The Kingdom appears to be calculating that such a deployment, modeled on the base Ankara set up in neighboring Qatar a decade ago, could bolster its deterrence against threats like Iran and the Houthis in Yemen. Yet if the Qatar base is any precedent, the defense such a presence can realistically provide may prove far more limited than Riyadh hopes.

In an Oct. 27 report, the pro-government Turkish daily Turkiye Gazetesi stated that Saudi Arabia is seeking a Turkish base on the Qatar model, citing security sources. According to the daily, Turkish forces stationed there would not take part in any operations against the Houthis or engage in combat, and would keep a posture based entirely on defense and deterrence.

The daily argued that the emirate has not been attacked since Turkish forces arrived there, and described collective deterrence as the foundation of the new defense pact between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye. While both points underpin the case for a base, the first does not seem to survive the Iranian and Israeli strikes Qatar has faced since 2025, and the second has yet to be tested.

A reversal in Riyadh

The reported request comes as the regional security order is shifting rapidly. With the Israeli-US war on Iran, which began on Feb. 28, and Houthi strikes now testing Gulf Arab states' defenses, Riyadh appears to be widening the circle of partners it relies on. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on Aug. 7 in the eponymous Islamic holy city. At an Oct. 5 meeting in Riyadh, their defense and foreign ministers agreed to provide the forces and capabilities set out under the pact and to ensure their rapid deployment to the Kingdom.


Ankara submitted the agreement to the Turkish parliament for ratification on Oct. 20, and a parliamentary committee approved it a week later. Lawmakers began voting on Nov. 4 and ratified it the following day, by 279 votes to 119. However, as Reuters has noted in its coverage, sending Turkish forces to the Kingdom will require a separate parliamentary mandate.

A Turkish base would also mark a striking reversal for Riyadh. In June 2017, days after Saudi Arabia led a blockade of Qatar, a Saudi official told the state-run Saudi Press Agency that the Kingdom would not allow Turkiye to establish military bases on its territory. Earlier that month, in an interview with Portuguese broadcaster RTP, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he had previously offered King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud a similar base.

The Qatar test

Turkiye already has soldiers in Qatar, and six Turkish F-16 fighter jets have been stationed at the emirate's Dukhan Air Base since July 2024. The Turkiye Gazetesi report's assertion that the Gulf Arab state has not been attacked since Turkish troops arrived does not hold.

On June 23, 2025, Iran fired missiles at the sprawling Al-Udeid Air Base, which hosts US forces, during its 12-day war with Israel and the US. On Sept. 9 that year, Israel targeted the Hamas political leadership in the Qatari capital, Doha. According to a US defense official, Israeli fighter jets over the Red Sea launched ballistic missiles in that strike. And after the Israeli-US war on Iran began on Feb. 28 this year, Qatar came under repeated Iranian aerial attacks. By the next day, Qatari forces had intercepted 65 ballistic missiles and 12 drones.


Turkish forces in Qatar are ill-equipped to stop projectiles of that kind. Turkiye currently lacks anti-ballistic missile capabilities to defend its own airspace. Ankara has been weighing the Franco-Italian SAMP/T air defense system since a 2017 letter of intent with Paris and Rome, and is also looking at later versions of its homegrown Siper long-range missiles to close the gap.

Turkiye's military presence may have helped deter Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) when they led the blockade of Qatar beginning in June 2017. On June 7 that year, the Turkish parliament passed a bill to deploy troops to the nascent Turkish base in Qatar, in a show of support for Doha. Riyadh may now look to Ankara to play a similar role for its own security as it faces threats from the Houthis to its south and Iran to its east.

Training, not a trip-wire

While a single newspaper report does not mean a Turkish base in Saudi Arabia is imminent, analysts do not rule out the possibility. Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE, believes a base for training and defensive support would at least be viable. "The credibility issue boils down to sourcing, which right now I am not seeing anything firm from Saudi sources," Bohl told Amwaj.media.

"The viability would be because Saudi Arabia could certainly use greater training cooperation with Turkiye, NATO's [second-largest] army, and Turkish troops would help backstop the monarchy's internal security forces in crisis scenarios."

Nevertheless, the analyst also noted that the Kingdom most likely remains wary of Ankara's "long-term intentions" for the Arab world. If Turkiye does establish a base, Bohl explained, it would likely be "limited to training and defensive support, not a trip-wire force like the US tries to serve as." As a result, the analyst suggested that such an outpost would not serve as "a substantial deterrence to Iran or the Houthis except for where they are specifically deployed."

Bohl anticipates that air defenses are the most likely assets Turkiye would deploy at any Saudi base. "If Turkish air assets are deployed, I would imagine they would function similarly to how US forces do, as essentially guests on Saudi bases rather than on US-run bases in the Kingdom, in contrast to Qatar's Al Udeid base," he explained.

Turkish forces would be unlikely to handle Saudi internal security except in extreme circumstances, the analyst suggested, but "their presence on the ground creates a layer of internal deterrence for actors that might seek to target the monarchy itself, or for rivals within the monarchy who might seek to undermine [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman's authority."

A pact still untested

Suleyman Ozeren, a professorial lecturer at American University in Washington and senior fellow at the Orion Policy Institute, believes the report could be credible, since the reported Saudi request broadly aligns with what the pact's members agreed in Riyadh on Oct. 5. Under the pact, an armed assault on any member counts as one on all of them. In the scholar's view, that gives Ankara and Riyadh legitimate grounds for a Turkish presence on Saudi soil.

"Deploying military forces in Saudi Arabia might provide limited deterrence against Iran and the Houthis for now, depending on the level of conflict escalation in the region," Ozeren told Amwaj.media. "For now, they would avoid any military confrontation with Turkiye and refrain from direct military engagement, but this may not stop them from targeting Saudi Arabia."

"However, if the Saudi-led conflict expands or the US and Israel war against Iran resumes and escalates into an all-out war and Tehran faces an existential conflict, then any military base in the region could become a legitimate target for Iran," the scholar warned.

Ozeren anticipates that Turkish security and defense support for Saudi Arabia will align with the Mecca pact and include intelligence sharing, joint training and logistics. Whether the Mecca pact develops into what he called a "NATO-like active military defense alliance" remains to be seen.

If the report is broadly accurate, a Turkish military base in Saudi Arabia would amount to more than the Qatar model. The arrangement with Doha includes no explicit commitment for Ankara to come to Qatar's defense if it is attacked. The Mecca pact, by contrast, makes collective defense and deterrence its central objective. At the same time, Ozeren points to the caveat that no mechanism has been set out for how that commitment would be triggered.

The scholar also noted that earlier tensions between Saudi Arabia and Turkiye, beginning with the 2017 blockade of Qatar that was lifted in 2021, ultimately did not escalate into military conflict. Relations sank further after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed at his country's consulate in Istanbul in Oct. 2018. Ties began to recover in 2022, and in June that year the crown prince visited Turkiye for the first time since the killing.

"The current situation in the region is fundamentally and strategically different, which could potentially put Ankara in a very peculiar situation with Iran and the Houthis, for that matter," Ozeren said.