Iran International
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact in Mecca on Friday that never once named a threat, and within hours Iranian officials and clerics had named it for them, mocking the agreement and promising that "the roar of our missiles" will reach its signatories.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hosted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, declares that an armed attack on any of the three will be treated as an attack on all.
A Turkish official called the pact "purely defensive," directed at no specific actor and open to other countries in the region.
The signatories' combined weight explains the attention. Turkey fields NATO's second-largest military, Saudi Arabia is one of the world's top oil exporters and home to Islam's holiest sites, and Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed Muslim state.
The pact caps nearly a year of negotiations and builds on last year's Saudi-Pakistani defense agreement, under which some 8,000 Pakistani troops, fighter jets and an air-defense system have already deployed to the kingdom.
The timing needs little decoding. Since the war began on February 28, Iran and its allies have struck US bases and civilian infrastructure across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Jordan, shut the Strait of Hormuz to most shipping, and, through the Houthis, declared a naval embargo on Saudi ports in the Red Sea.
For Riyadh, three years of regional war have also raised a harder question: whether the American security umbrella it built its plans on still opens.
Tehran answers the question nobody asked
The pact's statement avoided Iran's name. Tehran filled the silence itself.
"The Saudis should know that a paper agreement with Turkey and Pakistan will not bring them security, just as years of one-way nursing of the Americans brought them none," Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of the Iranian parliament's national security committee, wrote on X. "Correct your policies so you no longer need to go begging for security."
The clerical establishment was blunter. "Borrowed security and begging America for security will not save you," Alireza Arafi, the Friday prayer leader in Qom, told regional governments.
"As long as you are with the enemies of Islam and Iran, the roar of our missiles will threaten you."
In Ahvaz, another Friday preacher said Iran was working to extend its missiles' range to 15,000 kilometers so that "the American people, too, will see what it is like to be left in blood and destruction."
For a pact its authors insisted was aimed at no one, the replies arrived from one address.
Riyadh braces, Baghdad moves
The agreement was signed against specific and immediate warnings. A Saudi official told CNN the kingdom is preparing for coordinated attacks on energy facilities, ports and airports by Iraqi militias and Yemen's Houthis "in the very near future," under the guidance of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, citing intelligence that included tracked meetings between militia and Guards personnel and movements of drones and missiles.
Baghdad, unusually, is moving against the same groups. An Iraqi government official told Iran International the country is "on the verge of delivering the final blow" to Iran-backed militias, with intelligence indicating planned operations not only against Saudi Arabia but against Kuwait, Jordan and Syria.
Iraq's armed forces said a security plan is underway to foil any attack on the kingdom, and troops have been ordered to prevent Iraqi territory from being used for missile and drone launches at neighbors.
The warnings follow a week in which the Houthis struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and hit Najran's airport, wounding 11 civilians, including a four-year-old child.
Reporting by Asharq al-Awsat and Israeli media describes a joint Houthi-Iraqi operations room established at Jurf al-Sakhr, the militia stronghold south of Baghdad.
A deal Tehran wants, on terms it dictates
The day's other track ran through Muscat.
Iran's parliament confirmed the framework of an understanding with Oman has been agreed, and lawmaker Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani described its logic with unusual candor: Iran is negotiating with America "in Oman's name," he said, over an arrangement that would leave the strait's management in Iranian hands and charge passing ships a tariff of 7 percent of cargo value, split three-quarters to Tehran and a quarter to Muscat.
President Donald Trump sounded confident and noncommittal at once. "It's obvious they don't want to be hit. They want to make a deal. So, we'll see," he said, adding that gasoline prices would rise only if he had to "do another hit" on Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Arab mediators doubt Iran's diplomats have the authority to deliver any Hormuz deal they sign, as hardliners accuse the negotiating team of giving too much away.
That doubt, in the end, is what Friday's ceremony in Mecca was about. Three of the region's heaviest states have concluded that whatever emerges from the talks, the threat that closed the strait and burned their ports will outlast the paperwork, and they intend to face it attached to one another rather than waiting, separately, for Washington.
Pezeshkian could not see the man beside him and later asked whether the voice he had heard had really belonged to the supreme leader, according to the sources.
Their account of the only known meeting between Pezeshkian and the Islamic Republic’s third supreme leader differs sharply from the version the president has told in public.
In mid-May, Pezeshkian told a gathering of trade association representatives that he had spent two and a half hours with the new leader “in a cordial atmosphere.” Iran International’s sources said the encounter lasted only a few minutes, after which the president was asked to leave.
The meeting itself was a concession extracted under pressure. Khamenei's office agreed to it only after repeated requests from Pezeshkian and his threat to resign, the sources said, and the president was informed that, contrary to standard practice, he would not be received at the leader's usual residence.
Instead, his security detail delivered him to an undisclosed location somewhere in Tehran. There he was taken from his own vehicle and seated in the back of a commercial car with tinted windows, where, apparently, Khamenei was already waiting. The spot was dark enough that the two men could not see each other, and Khamenei's guards did not permit a handshake. The conversation was carried entirely by voice.
The treatment reportedly angered Pezeshkian, who regarded it as humiliating. According to individuals in the president's office, he later asked whether the person beside him had in fact been the supreme leader, since he had only heard a voice in the dark.
It is unclear whether the remark was an expression of anger or genuine doubt. Pezeshkian has since requested a second meeting, this time at the leader's residence. The request has so far been denied.
A leader nobody sees
The president's uncertainty lands in a country that has neither seen nor heard its new ruler. In the roughly five months since the Assembly of Experts selected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father, not a single audio recording or video of him has been released.
The silence has become a subject inside Iran's own state-aligned press. On Sunday, the website of the Hamshahri newspaper published a short video claiming that foreign intelligence services could trace any audio recording of the new leader and locate his hideout by measuring acoustic energy, analyzing the frequency signature of the electrical grid and examining background noise. The video added that spy agencies could analyze vocal-tract resonances to determine the extent of his injuries or anxiety, a claim that fed rather than calmed speculation about his condition.
The world's assessments diverge just as sharply. Three weeks ago, US President Donald Trump put the odds that Mojtaba Khamenei had been killed at 90 percent. Israel's prime minister recently said he is alive.
Even the government's own senior figures do not tell one story. "I have not seen Mojtaba Khamenei during this period, and only a limited number of people have met with him," Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a July interview with the online program The Story of the War. One day later, Pezeshkian said in a speech that the number of meetings with the leader had increased.
A resignation he cannot repeat
The strain between the president and the leader's office has since spilled into the open. In a video circulated on social media on Monday, Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, a Khamenei family relative by marriage, said the new leader has formally warned that Pezeshkian's next resignation, after 28 threats or attempts, will be his last.
"He declared it officially," Kharrazi said, "and that is why they packed up, turned down the wick, and stopped threatening to resign."
The warning matches Iran International's earlier reporting. A knowledgeable source said in late May that Pezeshkian had sent a formal letter to the leader's office asking to step down, a resignation driven by what the president described as the Revolutionary Guards' complete control over the running of the country.
A president who cannot resign, then, serves a leader he cannot see. Five months into the new reign, Mojtaba Khamenei remains unseen, unheard and unrecorded, a ruler his own president has met exactly once, in the dark, and still cannot be certain he has met at all.
The figures, presented at a public event hosted by the University of Tehran's Faculty of Urban Planning, offer the most detailed breakdown yet of damage across the capital following the conflict.
The report says District 4 in northeastern Tehran recorded the highest number of strikes, followed by District 21 in the west, District 1 in the north and District 22 in the northwest.
"The number of strikes in District 4 alone exceeded the combined total recorded in some provinces," Hossein Nouhi, a certified construction expert in Tehran's municipality, said during the event.
According to the report by Tehran Municipality's Urban Planning and Architecture Department, District 4 was hit 90 times, District 21 Tehran sustained 62 strikes, District 1 recorded 57 and District 22 recorded 55. District 17 in southwestern Tehran was the least affected, with three reported strikes.
Housing damage
The municipality said 50,849 residential units across Tehran sustained damage ranging from broken windows and doors to complete destruction.
Around 40,000 homes required minor repairs, about 8,900 suffered more extensive architectural damage, 415 buildings required structural reinforcement or reconstruction and 2,042 homes were completely destroyed and must be rebuilt, according to the report.
District 4 recorded the largest number of damaged residential units with 7,948, followed by District 2 with 4,037, District 15 with 3,490, District 11 with 3,432, District 21 with 3,205 and District 7 with 3,196.
The report also found that District 7 had the highest number of completely destroyed homes, with 429 units, followed by District 4 with 325 and District 11 with 248.
Estimated economic and environmental costs
Nouhi put the country's economic losses from the 40-day conflict at an estimated $280 billion, excluding psychological impacts and the cost of restoring industrial production. He argued that the conflict highlighted the need to require shelters in new high-rise developments.
Separately, geologist Mehdi Zare’ estimated that military strikes generated around 10 million metric tons of debris across affected urban areas by August 1. He said the waste includes concrete, steel, glass, asbestos and industrial pollutants that could create long-term environmental and public health risks.
Zare’ also said the demolition and cleanup process released millions of tons of greenhouse gases, adding to the environmental impact of the conflict.
