The shipments identified in a U. N. report violate sanctions on both countries and demonstrate just how good these rogue regimes are at evading them.
A report by U. N. experts finds that North Korea supplied the Syrian government with materials that could have been used to produce chemical weapons on several occasions in the last two years, lending weight to long-standing suspicions that Syria is continuing to use these weapons on its own people.
The 200-page report, which remains unpublished but was reviewed by the New York Times, documents at least 40 previously unreported shipments from North Korea to Syria from 2012 to 2017, which included prohibited ballistic-missile parts and materials with both civilian and military uses. The supplies the U. N. suspects are being used to make chemical weapons include acid-resistant tiles, valves, and thermometers. North Korean missile experts have also been seen working at Syrian chemical-weapons and missile facilities.
The report’s findings paint a damning picture of the international community’s ability to police the global black market in illegal weapons: Both North Korea and Syria are under extremely heavy sanctions from the U. N., U. S., EU, and other countries and supranational organizations, yet they have been able to do regular business with each other, helping Syrian president Bashar al-Assad carry out atrocities while also financing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile programs.
While the U. N. panel did not find conclusive evidence of ongoing collaboration between the regimes to manufacture chemical weapons currently, experts told the Times that it laid out in unprecedented detail the sophisticated measures these countries have taken to get around these sanctions. The report describes some of North Korea’s methods of sanctions evasion, which include a complex web of shell companies, a network of sympathetic individuals in unnamed foreign countries who provide access to financing, the use of its own diplomats to carry out smuggling, and cyber operations.
The relationship between the Assad and Kim regimes dates back to before the current generation of dictators rose to power, with North Korea aiding Syria in the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1960s and ’70s, helping the country develop its own ballistic missiles, and helping it build a plutonium-production facility, which Israel destroyed in 2007. North Korea has also supported Syria’s chemical-weapons program since at least the 1990s.
After being accused of carrying out a sarin-gas attack on a rebel enclave that killed as many as 1,400 people in 2013, Assad agreed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy his stockpile under a deal brokered by Russia amid threats of military action from the U.
