Mick Hartley

North Korean ties with Syria have been well documented. As Jonathan Spyer confirms, they're still very much in place:

Reports have emerged this week indicating the presence of North Korean military personnel in Syria. They note that 15 North Korean helicopter pilots are operating on behalf of the Assad regime within the country.

The reports have been validated by the pro-rebel but usually reliable Syrian Observatory for Human Rights . They are also not the first evidence that Pyongyang is actively involved on the ground in the Assad regime’s war effort.

Earlier this year, the Saudi-based regional newspaper Sharq al-Awsat carried eyewitness reports revealing the presence of North Korean officers among the Syrian regime’s ground forces in the city of Aleppo. On this occasion, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights was itself the source of the report….

These sightings are the latest confirmation of the long, close and cooperative relationship maintained between Pyongyang and the regime of the Assads. The connection precedes the current Syrian war. It forms part of North Korea’s broader network of relationships in the Middle East.

Most famously, of course the plutonium reactor under construction at the Al-Kibar facility near Deir ez-Zor, destroyed by Israel in September 2007, was built under North Korean supervision. North Korean participation in the reactor’s construction was confirmed by a high-level Iranian defector, Ali Reza Asghari. According to Der Spiegel, North Korean scientists were present at the site at the time of the bombing.

But Assad’s fledgling nuclear program was not the only project in which Damascus was aided by Pyongyang. Cooperation also took place both in the field of conventional weapons, and in that of non-nuclear WMD….

Why are the North Koreans doing this? The answer lies not in the realm of ideology. The North Koreans are isolated and subject to sanctions. They need money, and will sell to whoever pays them.

So who is paying them? In the case of Syria, the answer is – almost certainly the Iranians. As with Russia, Syria does not get free handouts of arms from its sponsors outside of the region. Rather, it gets free cash handouts from its regional patron, Iran, for whom the survival of the Assad regime is most vital.

This money is then used to pay for Pyongyang’s and Moscow’s hardware and expertise.

Of course, Iran is North Korea’s main customer in the Middle East. So Pyongyang’s evident involvement in the Syrian war is also a matter of long standing alliances, as well as monetary gain….

The evidence suggesting the presence of North Korean soldiers and aviators in Syria ultimately is further testimony to the determined and effective effort underway from the very start of the war by Assad’s allies to keep him in place. It may also be assumed that the North Koreans have noted and enjoyed the rudderless, wavering US policy toward the same issue over the same period.

And, on the subject of that "rudderless, wavering US policy":

Israel is fuming with the White House for confirming that it was the Israeli Air Force that struck a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday, hitting weaponry that was set to be transferred to Hezbollah….

Israel’s Channel 10 TV on Friday night quoted Israeli officials branding the American leak as “scandalous.” For Israel’s ally to be acting in this way was “unthinkable,” the officials were quoted as saying….

Channel 2′s military analyst, Roni Daniel, said the Obama administration’s behavior in leaking the information was unfathomable.

Daniel noted that by keeping silent on whether it carried out such attacks, Israel was maintaining plausible deniability, so that Syria’s President Bashar Assad did not feel pressured to respond to the attacks.

But the US leaks “are pushing Assad closer to the point where he can’t swallow these attacks, and will respond.” This in turn would inevitably draw further Israeli action, Daniel posited, and added bitterly: “Then perhaps the US will clap its hands because it will have started a very major flare-up.”