North Korea coming to Assad's rescue
By Alexandre Y. Mansourov
“A modern war is an artillery war,” said Kim Jong-un on March 11 during his inspection of a long-range artillery sub-unit of Korean People’s Army (KPA) Unit 641 whose mission is to strike and wipe out the enemies on the South Korean-held Baengnyeong Island in the West Sea. Three months later, Syria’s opposition stronghold of Qusair was shelled at dawn with a massive rocket, artillery and mortar fire barrage, and overrun by government forces backed by Hezbollah militants.
Arab-speaking North Korean military advisors were integral to the operational planning of the surprise attack and artillery campaign execution during the battle for Qusair, the capture of which represents a significant military and symbolic victory for the Assad regime and its Hezbollah allies and potentially changes the Syrian civil war dynamics.
A year ago, foreign observers predicted North Korea would cut its losses short and disengage from Syria in the wake of the overthrow of friendly regimes in Algeria, Egypt and Libya. But, this proved to be wishful thinking. On the contrary, North Korea’s young militant leader Kim Jong-un stepped up military support for his country’s long-time strategic partner, the Assad regime backed by Russia and Iran, helping it turn the tide in the nationwide civil war against the radical Sunni rebels backed by the Western liberal democracies in alliance with conservative Gulf monarchies.
Why is North Korea fighting for Assad in Syria’s civil war? The well-entrenched Kim family came to the rescue of the bleeding Assad family, exporting its trademark anti-American “revolutionary spirit of the offensive,” for three reasons. First, birds of a feather flock together. The
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strategic partnership has a half-a-century-long mutually beneficial history, most of it under-appreciated due to its clandestine nature. The North Korean-Syrian state-to-state, party-to-party, and military-to-military ties are extensive, well developed, and based on profound institutional links and personal affinities. Suffice it to say that current KPA Chief of General Staff unsinkable hard-line general Kim Kyok-sik served as North Korea’s military liaison to Syria in the tumultuous 1970s, coordinating the North’s military assistance to the Assad regime during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War and post-war rehabilitation of Syrian armed forces in the mid-1970s and managing North Korean military sales and military construction projects in Syria for almost a decade.
Although for either side this is not a core relationship affecting vital national interests like the regime survival and state existence, current leaders in
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have similar anti-imperialist and anti-American worldviews, and share key strategic concerns. They are faced with comparable geopolitical and military security challenges and have mutually complementary economic priorities. Their bilateral cooperation ranges from trade in guns, grains, and fuels to joint IT and biotech research, joint missile manufacturing, and cooperation in the nuclear field.
The DPRK’s alleged nuclear proliferation to Syria should be regarded as a tip of the iceberg and as a natural progression of strengthening "friendly and cooperative relations" underpinned by trust, mutual solidarity and loyalty between the leaders and policy elites of the two countries, forged in the combined warfare experiences on the Middle Eastern battlefronts. Although it is not a military alliance based on legally binding mutual defense obligations, it is a very important “special relationship” with a strategic partner for the DPRK because of deep military-to-military ties and high value added, reliability and predictability of strategic cooperation with Syria on the international arena. This is an enduring wide and deep relationship, which is hard to break.
Second, North Korea’s intervention in Syria’s civil war is aimed at stopping the “Western barbarians” and “colored revolutions” they export at the far-flung gates to ensure they will never reach North Korea’s shores. Kim Jong-un reportedly believes in Sun Tzu’s art of war which taught him that “when a warlike prince attacks a powerful state, his generalship shows itself in preventing the concentration of the enemy's forces. He overawes his opponents, and their allies are prevented from joining against him… In a country where high roads intersect, join hands with your allies. Do not linger in dangerously isolated positions.”
For months, the North’s warlike leader emboldened by his country’s nuclear breakout tried to intimidate and cause divisions among his enemies with hyper-belligerent war rhetoric threatening preemptive nuclear strikes against the U.S., South Korea and Japan. Now he seeks to divert Washington’s attention and resources away from the Korean Peninsula by waging a proxy war against the United States and its allies in Syria. Pyongyang takes full advantage of all-out Russian, Chinese, and Iranian support for Damascus “to defend the frontline of the joint anti-American and anti-imperialist struggle” on the Syrian battlefield without fear of being depicted as a pariah or having to pay diplomatic or political price for its actions.
The North Korean leadership is not ignorant or naive. It does understand that if the U.S. gets sucked into another war in the Middle East during “sequestration,” not only will it undermine the short-to-mid-term credibility of its defense commitment to South Korea, but it will also buy time for Pyongyang to further build up its own nuclear arsenal and advance its war preparations against the South.
Third, the KPA military advisory group in Syria is probably tasked with a wide range of tactical missions, as well. Reportedly, the North Korean military advisors provide technical assistance to Syria’s defense industry, especially the Syrian Defense Ministry factories southeast of Aleppo, in addition to technical assistance in military engineering and construction involved in the repair and rehabilitation of the destroyed military infrastructure. The Qusair battle demonstrates their participation in operational planning and supervision of artillery warfare.
There is no doubt they are tasked with erasing any traces of North Korea’s past assistance to Assad’s chemical weapons program (just in case he does lose power) and collecting battlefield intelligence on the combat use and performance of Western arms, especially those that can potentially be used in the Korean battlefield such as the ROK-made K9 Thunder 155-mm howitzers employed by Turkey against Syrian government targets and ROKAF-used F-16s employed in Israeli air strikes against Damascus. Moreover, the Syrian civil war offers the North Korean military planners the first-hand look at the combat tactics of anti-regime rebels trained and guided by the U.S. and its allies, which could become handy if the United States one day succeeds in destabilizing the political situation in North Korea.
Why does it matter that North Korea chose to throw its lot with the Assad regime on the battlefield? Pyongyang’s decision reveals its determination that the Assad regime has finally turned the tide and started to regain control over the country. Although the North Korean assistance is limited and does not have the potential to fundamentally change the course of the Syrian civil war, the North Korean military expertise does affect the military outcomes of local tactical battles, adding to the winning momentum of the Assad forces. North Korea’s military involvement in Syria shows the Kim regime deeply discounts the likelihood of any possible breakthrough in relations with Washington in the near future and downplays the risk that its overall national policy goals will be adversely affected by its increasing strategic and tactical support for the Assad regime.
But, most importantly, it proves Kim Jong-un is a player and a risk-taker. He is taking considerable risks and walking on the cutting edge in far-flung lands today, expecting material and reputational payoffs at home and in his own neighborhood in the future, if his bet on Assad’s eventual victory proves to be right.
The author is a visiting scholar with the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University.