Islamabad: Pakistan is indeed part of the Saudi-led 35-nation alliance against terrorism, the spokesman of the Pakistani Foreign Office said Thursday.

“We are in contact with them (Saudi Arabia) to know about our role,” in the alliance, the spokesman, Qazi Khalilullah, said during a weekly media briefing in Islamabad.

He said Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are close friends and they cooperate in diverse fields.

Earlier on Wednesday, a statement issued by the Pakistani foreign ministry had stated that Pakistan “welcomes the formation of the 35-nation alliance to counter terrorism and is awaiting further details to decide the extent of its participation in different activities of the alliance.”

Saudi Arabia announced on Tuesday that it had forged the 35-nation alliance of Muslim countries for fighting terrorism and extremism, which included Pakistan.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir had later explained that the participating countries would themselves decide about the extent of their participation.

The Pakistani military had started in October a new phase in the bilateral defence relationship by training Saudi special forces personnel in countering terrorism. Chief of Army Staff Gen Raheel Sharif visited Saudi Arabia after the special exercises for discussions on counter-terrorism efforts.

A major national daily, in editorial comments on Thursday on the Saudi-led alliance, said it would be “best” for Pakistan to proceed carefully.

Besides the number of member-states and the “geographical sweep” the alliance alliance seeks to “bring together countries as disparate in foreign policy orientation as Nigeria, Turkey and Malaysia,” the editorial in Dawn said.

“Not included in the alliance that has both military and ‘ideological’ content...are some of the Middle East’s key states, including Iran, Iraq and Syria,” the editorial noted.

“For Pakistan, the alliance poses many questions. Since Riyadh, according to the Saudi defence minister, will be the ‘joint operations centre’, it is not clear whether alliance members would be required to take part in military action on Syrian or Iraqi soil,” it said.

“This is not to deny the need for all regional countries, and the Muslim world in general, to evolve a common strategy to fight the evil that is terrorism, but the way to achieve this is a gradual alignment of anti-terror policies free from any thinking that smacks of sectarianism,” the paper said.