North Korea says syria's Assad will visit with Kim

If Assad were to visit Pyongyang, it would be the first time that Kim hosted a meeting with another head of state in the North Korean capital.

“The optics are horrendous given that Kim Jong Un is trying to posture as a good guy,” said Sue Mi Terry, the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Hosting Assad, one of the worst butchers on the planet, as your first foreign leader visit is not a good PR move.”

Assad and Kim have much in common. Both are heirs to family dynasties in countries that have long thumbed their noses at the international system, saying that it was biased against them and in favor of their foes. They also have a shared interest in developing powerful weapons.

After years of isolation, Kim has aggressively pursued diplomatic relations in recent months. Last week in Pyongyang, he hosted Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, the first senior Russian official to meet with the young North Korean leader.

Since the end of March, Kim has twice met with President Xi Jinping of China. In April, he crossed the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas to meet with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. The two leaders met again last weekend.

The Korean Central News Agency reported that Assad said he intended to visit Pyongyang when he received the credentials of the new North Korean ambassador, Mun Jong Nam, on May 30 in Damascus.

“I am going to visit the DPRK,” the agency reported Assad as saying, using the initials of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

It was unclear if Assad had promised a concrete visit or had merely suggested it as a possibility out of diplomatic politeness.

Analysts questioned whether the report represented the true intentions of Assad, given that it gave no date or details. David Maxwell, associate director for the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, said that Mun may have misunderstood Assad, or his aides may have misreported what they thought the Syrian leader said.

Given the looming summit with Trump, Maxwell said he was puzzled by the North’s announcement of a possible visit from the Syrian leader, who has been entangled in a bloody civil war and condemned by the West for the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens.

“I am struggling to figure it out and trying to put aside my Western bias and look at from Kim Jong Un’s perspective,” Maxwell said. “If they think it enhances their legitimacy, then they certainly don’t have a good understanding of the international community, and certainly what the U.S. is going to think about it.”

United Nations experts accused North Korea of shipping materials to the Syrian government that could be used in the production of chemical weapons during the brutal civil war it has been fighting against rebels since 2011.

The materials were part of at least 40 shipments that North Korea made to Syria between 2012 and 2017 that could be used for both civilian and military purposes, the U.N. report said. North Korean technicians had also been seen working at chemical weapons and missile facilities in Syria.

Trump has twice ordered airstrikes against Syria to punish Assad for suspected chemical attacks on civilians, saying the Syrian president had committed “crimes of a monster.”

North Korea and Syria have long maintained warm ties, dating to the reign of Kim Il Sung, the North’s founding leader. The shipments reported by the U.N. were only the most recent example of apparent weapons cooperation between the two countries.

In 2007, Israeli warplanes struck a nuclear-related facility inside Syria that Israeli intelligence believed North Korea was helping to equip.

North Korea supported Syria during the Arab-Israeli War in October 1973, sending troops including pilots and missile personnel.

Analysts said that by announcing a prospective visit from Assad, North Korea risked raising Trump’s ire and prompting him to cancel the Singapore summit again.

“Assad’s trip could again derail the newly resurrected summit or, at the least, cast a dark shadow,” said Bruce Klingner, a Korea specialist at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Of all the dictators in the world to meet, Kim had to pick the one that the U.S. has recently attacked and for which Trump has particular disdain.”

In remarks quoted by the Korean Central News Agency, Assad said “the Syrian government will as ever fully support all policies and measures of the DPRK leadership and invariably strengthen and develop the friendly ties with the DPRK.”

Just before Trump canceled the summit two weeks ago, the North put out hostile statements toward the United States, apparently responding to hard-line comments made by John R. Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, who suggested that the precedent for negotiations with North Korea to relinquish its nuclear weapons should be Libya, which agreed to ship all of its nuclear materials out of the country. North Korea rejected that model, noting that Libya and its leader were later destroyed by a NATO-backed coalition.

Although Trump and officials from the North seemed to have smoothed things over, analysts said in announcing a visit from Assad, North Korea could be maneuvering for another tactical advantage in advance of the summit.

Perhaps, said Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the North is seeking to send the message that “they’ve got other options of one kind or another.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

North Korea says syria's Assad will visit with Kim

The report, which was not confirmed by Syria, came just days after Trump announced that the previously canceled summit between the American president and Kim in Singapore was back on for June 12.

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