What North Korea-Syria military alliance means for Donald Trump

August 31, 2015: A ceremony to name a park in Damascus after Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founding father inside the Syrian city’s Kafar Susseh neighborhood
Increased North Korean involvement in a nation hit by violent civil war, which includes Islamic State brutality, doesn’t bode well for a U.S. government already concerned about the ongoing military alliance.
President Donald Trump’s administration can be increasingly worried “which [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un can be not only profiting via Syria’s six-year war, yet also learning via the idea,” Jay Solomon, a visiting fellow at American think tank The Washington Institute, wrote in a recent note.

North Korean exports of military equipment to the Arab nation, including propellants for Syria’s Scud ballistic missiles, protective chemical suits in addition to also also respirators, are believed to have occurred for years. in addition to also also with state revenue increasingly strained under fresh sanctions, Pyongyang can be widely likely to continue such sales.

“Syria continues to rely on North Korean in addition to also also Iranian assistance for its missile programs, according to official U.S. accounts,” said a 2016 report by the Congressional Research Service, a research arm of the U.S. Congress.

Allegations have also surfaced which North Korean military advisers are inside Syria — a charge which both countries have denied. The secretive Asian state can be also widely believed to have helped develop a Syrian nuclear facility, which was destroyed in a 2007 Israeli airstrike.

At least two North Korean shipments to a Syrian government agency responsible for the nation’s chemical weapons program were intercepted This kind of year, Reuters reported in August, citing a confidential United Nations report. “Previous shipments via North Korea are not known to have contained chemicals or chemical weapons production equipment,” Rod Barton, former director of strategic technology at Australia’s Defense Intelligence Organisation, wrote in an August note published by the Lowy Institute.