Are North Koreans fighting in Syria? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds

Last week, representatives of Western-backed Syrian opposition delegation in Geneva told Russian state media that President Bashar Assad had a surprising new ally on the Syrian battlefield: militia units from North Korea. “Two North Korean units are there, which are Chalma-1 and Chalma-7,” Asaad az-Zoubi, head of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC) to Syrian peace talks in the Swiss city, reportedly told Tass news agency on Tuesday.

In any other context, the presence of soldiers from the internationally isolated and geographically distant country North Korea might seem absurd. However, the civil war in Syria has emerged as a mini-world war over the past five years, with foreign fighters from at least 86 countries believed to be fighting there.

The Syrian regime headed by Assad is already known to have the support of a number of international partners, including Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. And this isn’t the first time that there have been reports of soldiers from the Hermit Kingdom being involved in the conflict.

In 2013, Rami Abdulrahman, director of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), told Saudi-owned Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat that a small number of North Koreans were in Syria, to provide logistical and planning support. “The exact number of the officers is not known, but there are definitely 11 to 15 North Korean officers, most of whom speak Arabic,” Abdulrahman said, according to a translation published by South Korean outlet Chosun Ilbo. Abdulrahman’s report was followed up the next year by another from Jane’s Defence Weekly, which reported that North Korea was assisting helping Syria improve its missile capabilities.

These reports are hard to confirm, but many experts believe they are credible: North Korea and Syria have had a military relationship for decades and there’s little sign it’s been shaken recently.

“The North Koreans have been involved with Syria since the late-1960s,” says Joseph S. Bermudez Jr, a contributor to 38 North, an analysis website affiliated with the US-Korea Institute at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. That involvement included providing advisers and air defense troops immediately after the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel, Bermudez says, and stretches to the modern era, when North Korea is believed to have provided technology used to help build the secret al-Kibar nuclear site in Syria, which was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in 2007.