Pakistan, Sept. 7 -- Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar held phone calls with Saudi Arabian and Turkish foreign ministers on Sunday and followed up on the understandings reached at the inaugural meeting of the Makkah Defence Alliance last month, the Foreign Office (FO) said.

The joint defence pact was signed on August 7 and empowers the member states to treat an attack against one of them as an attack against all of them. Its inaugural meeting was held on August 31 in Istanbul, where it was decided that the alliance's secretariat would be initially headed by Pakistan for three years.

The three countries also agreed to work towards strengthening their defence capabilities and the cohesion of their armed forces through j...