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Masmak Fort in central Riyadh, photographed February 24, 2014. Photo by Francisco Anzola, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
Middle East Insider · Issue 075 · Thursday, November 5, 2026
The Other Capitals
Good morning. This edition leaves Israel, Iran and Washington out on purpose and takes the capitals that made news anyway. Saudi Arabia signed a defense agreement with Syria and loans worth more than $403 million, Turkey’s parliament began ratifying the Mecca pact, Lebanon’s prime minister warned Lebanese groups off Yemen in a message aimed at Hezbollah, and Erbil elected a speaker after two years.
Sources: Reuters, the Saudi Press Agency via Arab News, Enab Baladi, The National, Turkish Minute, BBC Türkçe, Türkiye Today, Dawn, Naharnet, MTV Lebanon, Shafaq News, the Yemeni presidency, 964media, Rudaw, AFP, the Bahraini royal court, Bloomberg, AGBI, Saba, South24, Rigzone, Economy Middle East, Le360, Hespress, the Associated Press, Sudan Tribune, Ahram Online, Garowe Online, Hiiraan Online, meforum.org.
Michael Rubin briefs supporters in Philadelphia at noon Eastern today on the flashpoint where Turkey’s reach meets a fractured Syria, and in Washington on Friday on Erdoğan’s Turkey. Starting Monday I give four California lunches on Iran and the new Congress: Palo Alto on the 9th, San Francisco on the 10th, Los Angeles on the 13th and San Diego on the 16th.
| 1 | Riyadh binds Damascus. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Saudi capital on Wednesday, his second visit there in under a month. The two defense ministries signed a cooperation agreement whose terms were not published. The Saudi Fund for Development signed six concessional loans worth more than $403 million. The largest loan is $105 million for 25 civil defense centers. The rest goes to hospitals and clinics, the Aleppo thermal power plant, up to 10,000 damaged homes, 300,000 smart water meters and the Finance Ministry’s digital systems. Reuters reported last month that Damascus was weighing military help for the kingdom against the Houthis. Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said at the Manama Dialogue that Syria treats “security in the Gulf as part of its own” and is in talks to join the three-nation defense pact signed in Mecca in August. |
| 2 | Ankara’s vote. Turkey’s parliament finished general debate on the bill approving the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, adopted its first article late Wednesday and adjourned to 2 p.m. Thursday for the rest. The 16-article agreement obliges the other two members to help any member attacked from outside, and allows no withdrawal for ten years. Hulusi Akar chairs parliament’s defense commission and was chief of the general staff. He told the chamber: “People are talking about World War III. The footsteps of war are real.” The main opposition Republican People’s Party said it would vote yes. The pro-Kurdish DEM Party and three smaller parties objected that the military obligations are undefined. The same day Pakistan’s cabinet ratified a 2023 defense cooperation agreement with Kuwait, ten weeks after the two signed a protocol under which its armed forces help Kuwait’s with training and border management. |
| 3 | Beirut’s message on Yemen. After meeting President Joseph Aoun on Wednesday, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said: “Faced with the risks of renewed war in the region, I renew my warning of the dangers of dragging Lebanon into a new senseless adventure in service of outside interests.” He added: “I strongly condemn any involvement by Lebanese individuals or groups in the internal affairs of our Arab brothers, particularly any military activities that threaten the security and safety of their countries, most recently the actions announced by the government of brotherly Yemen.” He did not name Hezbollah. Yemen’s interior minister said on Tuesday that seven Hezbollah experts and 14 from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard are directing Houthi operations, “not a training mission, but a fully fledged military general staff.” Hezbollah called the accusations “baseless in their entirety and in their details.” Aoun telephoned Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council chairman Rashad al-Alimi the same day. On Thursday Judge Ghada Abou Alwan issued arrest warrants for the two men detained in October with a truck carrying 780 kilograms of explosives that Hezbollah has acknowledged were its own. |
| 4 | Erbil has a speaker. The Kurdistan Region’s parliament met on Wednesday for its first working session since members were sworn in on December 2, 2024. Fifty-two of the 100 members attended, one more than the law requires, and elected Vala Fareed of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) as speaker. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) holds 23 seats and is the KDP’s rival. It stayed away with the New Generation Movement, having said on Tuesday that the session would be “illegal, far removed from the principles of genuine partnership, and it is an attempt to impose the will of a single party.” Three members elected on PUK lists in Erbil attended anyway, at least two of them saying they had left the party. Fareed said the chamber will now move to name a Region president and a new cabinet. The current one has governed since July 2019. |
| 5 | Baghdad courts Bahrain while its militias push back. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi held talks in Manama on Wednesday, the first visit to the kingdom by a leader of post-2003 Iraq, and said he had come to “revive the historic relationship between the two countries.” The Bahraini Crown Prince’s readout thanks Iraq for condemning “the hostile Iranian aggression targeting the Kingdom,” a line that does not appear in The National’s account of the Iraqi side’s statement. At home, the Iran-aligned armed faction Harakat al-Nujaba rejected the changes Zaidi’s office is making to the law governing the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the state-paid militia umbrella. The cabinet approved that bill on September 29. A source told 964media that about 20 clauses are being reworked, including reorganizing the PMF into independent brigades and putting army and police officers in command posts. On Thursday a government source told Shafaq News that the talks on disarming the factions are near deadlock and that “continued verbal escalation could develop into confrontations on the streets.” |
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| 6 | Riyadh’s shortfall. The Saudi Finance Ministry’s statement for July to September shows a deficit of $22.4 billion, up about 145 percent from the second quarter. Oil revenue fell almost 40 percent from the prior quarter to about 116 billion riyals, the lowest since 2020. Nine months in, the deficit is $65 billion. The target for the whole year was $44 billion, and real GDP fell 4 percent in the quarter. Monica Malik of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said the oil drop “likely reflects the tax being offset against payments the government owes to Aramco.” She added: “I don’t think it reflects the fundamentals.” She expects oil revenue to recover in the fourth quarter. |
| 7 | Sworn in abroad. Three new ministers took the constitutional oath on Wednesday before Rashad al-Alimi in Riyadh rather than in Aden. Salem al-Awlaki becomes information minister in place of Moammar Eryani, who held the post since 2016. Alimi told the new civil service minister to address “job duplication and fictitious names” on the payroll. The same morning a Houthi ballistic missile hit a training center near Qatabah in northern Dhale, and a medical source gave South24 an initial toll of seven recruits killed and 50 wounded. A second strike killed two at a detention facility in Lahj. Military spokesman Majed al-Nuzaili said the army took three positions in al-Jawf and carried out 1,322 strikes, figures from his side only. |
| 8 | The strait, avoided. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is weighing a third crude pipeline from the UAE’s western coast to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, which could be open to outside users, on top of the existing line with capacity for about 2 million barrels a day around Hormuz and a second due next year. ADNOC’s answer: “We have advised Bloomberg that this report is not accurate and purely speculative.” The same report quotes Kuwait’s state oil company chief executive Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah as saying the emirate, which Bloomberg describes as entirely dependent on Hormuz, is in talks with Saudi Arabia and the UAE for pipeline alternatives. At the ADIPEC energy conference in Abu Dhabi the same day ADNOC announced $1 billion in financing from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation for two decarbonization projects. |
| 9 | Rabat closes the UN file. King Mohammed VI chaired a working session at the palace on Wednesday on what follows MINURSO, the UN mission in Western Sahara whose mandate the Security Council did not renew on October 30. The Royal Office said the King told the Interior Ministry’s MINURSO coordination unit to take “charge of the tasks of coordinating and supporting the liquidation and withdrawal of the mission.” It reaffirmed “the Kingdom’s firm commitment to the ceasefire, a voluntary commitment that will not change with the end of the mandate of the United Nations mission, which has repeatedly proved unable to monitor compliance with it and determine the consequences of its violation.” Bloomberg’s headline on Wednesday was “Morocco King Presses for Peacekeeper Pullout From Western Sahara.” Amine Ayoub wrote for the Forum on Wednesday that MINURSO’s end is the lesson for UNIFIL’s year-end drawdown. |
| 10 | The Horn. Ethiopia expelled six staff of the Sudanese consulate in Assosa and ordered it closed, officials of both governments told the AP, days after Khartoum said drones used against its power grid were supplied by the UAE and launched from Ethiopian territory, while Addis Ababa and Abu Dhabi deny arming the Rapid Support Forces. Khartoum has taken the complaint to the UN Security Council and the African Union. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nader Zaki told Ahram Online: “Ethiopia has no coastline, but it wants to acquire one by force,” and said of Turkey’s maritime deal with Libya: “The memorandum is null and void and will not be implemented.” In Mogadishu, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud dismissed Chief Justice Baashe Yusuf Ahmed on Wednesday, days before an expected ruling on a petition against the constitutional amendments. On Thursday the justices said the presidency’s announcement of the removal “lacks any legal basis” and that the purpose of the dismissal “was to interfere with a constitutional case already before the court.” African Union peacekeepers plan to take over four bases guarding the approaches to Mogadishu this month as Uganda’s troops leave. |
I draw three conclusions. First, the Sunni alliance that was signed in Mecca in August is being written into documents: a defense agreement with Damascus, Article 1 of the ratification bill adopted in Ankara and a Pakistani pact with Kuwait, all on one day. The party paying for it reported a deficit at nearly 150 percent of its annual target the same week. That does not stop the loans. It does limit how long Riyadh can carry allies at this pace.
Second, Lebanon’s government is separating itself from Hezbollah on the Yemen front as well as the Israeli one, and the work is being done by the prime minister’s statements and a judge’s warrants rather than by the army. A state that can condemn, charge and telephone the head of the Saudi-backed government in Yemen is further along than it was a year ago. It still has not disarmed Hezbollah.
Third, the Red Sea’s African shore is dividing into blocs. Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea are lining up against Ethiopia, and Rabat has decided that the end of the UN mission ends UN monitoring of the ceasefire in the Sahara. The Forum published on both this week: Ayoub on MINURSO and UNIFIL, Khalid Omer Yousif on Sudan and Siyad Madey on Ethiopia’s Russian jets.
MEF Online, From Western Sahara to Lebanon: The Hidden Dangers of Relying on U.N. Peacekeepers (Nov 4): Amine Ayoub on MINURSO’s lapse as the lesson for UNIFIL’s year-end drawdown.
MEF Observer, The West and Human Rights Groups Must Stop Playing Partisan Games Over Sudan (Nov 5): Khalid Omer Yousif on the alliance that shields the army and the Islamists who ruled Sudan for 30 years.
MEF Observer, Why Does Ethiopia Get the Russian Jets Washington Denied Egypt? (Nov 5): Siyad Madey on the 12 Su-35s Abiy announced in Moscow and the warning Cairo received over the same jet in 2019.
MEF Online, Algeria Sends Troops to Niger: A Warning for Morocco and Israel (Nov 3): Ayoub on Algeria’s first ground deployment abroad since 1973. “The obvious story is Russia. The better story is gas.”
Corrections Desk. Nothing to correct from Wednesday’s two editions; errors in this one go to [email protected].
If Riyadh’s loans to Damascus were news to you, forward this to someone who reads only the Israel and Iran headlines.
Reply with the one capital you think belonged in the ten and was left out.
Middle East Insider · From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum
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