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The Syria conflict is a war that speaks to our age, breaking its borders and dragging in international powers.
It is a proxy war where Russia, Iran, Turkey, the United States and others draw battle lines to pursue their interests and compete for influence.
To the countries mired in the Syria conflict, we can now add North Korea.
The country that is now nuclear-armed and has the Asia-Pacific region on alert has been linked to the production of chemical weapons in Syria.
The United Nations has tracked the delivery of material used to produce chemical weapons from Pyongyang to Damascus.
The New York Times has revealed that the yet-to-be-published UN report claims North Korean missile technicians are working at chemical weapons and missile plants in Syria.
It isn't the first time these reports have surfaced. In 2012, the Times reported Israeli intelligence had extracted top secret information from the home of the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Agency.
The report claimed the information included dozens of photographs of what Israel said was a "top-secret plutonium nuclear reactor".
The photographs also revealed "workers from North Korea"; the reactor had "many of the same engineering elements as the North Korean reactor in Yongbyon — a model that no one but the North Koreans had built in the past 35 years".
The US is concerned about links between North Korea and Iran; there is no hard evidence of nuclear ties, but last year CIA director Mike Pompeo told Fox News he was concerned Pyongyang could share its knowledge and technology and that "Iran would certainly be someone who would be willing to pay them for it".
The State Department monitors illicit arms shipments, seeking to block or deter them.
Myanmar and Pakistan also clients
Another confidential UN report has linked North Korea with ballistic missile technology and weapons to Myanmar.
North Korea also has long-standing ties with another nuclear power, Pakistan.
In 2016 the Diplomat magazine said the two countries since the 1970s have "cooperated extensively on the development of ballistic missile and nuclear technology".
The magazine said that during the 1990s then Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto purchased long range missiles from North Korea. Pakistan returned the favour with civilian nuclear technology.
The father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, scientist, AQ Khan, was also linked to the nuclear programs of North Korea, Iran and Libya.
This is a tangled web: North Korea endures tightening economic sanctions but has kept the cash flowing with its black market and technology and weapons trading.
North Korea runs a thriving trade in counterfeit goods, drugs, medicine, even at times, fake money: the US Government called the counterfeit $100 bills "supernotes".
The 'Sopranos' of Pyongyang
Some have likened the ruling Kim family to a Soprano state, a reference to the popular TV mafia crime series.
Last year, Canadian television quoted professor of national security studies at the US Army War College Paul Rexton Kan as saying the North Koreans had "nationalised crime, industrialised it and now they have weaponised it".
Professor Kan says Pyongyang has links with Japanese and Malaysian organised crime.
The Kim family is practised in the art of survival: North Korea has remained on a war footing for more than half a century; it has tens of thousands of American troops on its borders.
Pyongyang wants nothing less than a peace treaty with the United States and security guarantees; in the meantime it remains in its own way, sophisticated and elusive and far too readily underestimated.
The West popularly refers to North Korea as the "hermit kingdom"; it's true most of it's people remain largely sealed off from the rest of the world, but the regime is open for business.
No longer civil
The UN report allegedly connecting North Korea and Syria points to our complicated times.
In the second half of the 20th century, as war between states declined, civil war became more prevalent. As historian David Armitage says, civil war has "filled the graveyard".
Professor Armitage's recent book, Civil Wars: A History Of Ideas, charts the rise of these localised conflicts. Since the end of the Cold War at the close of the 1980s, he says "a total of 20 intrastate wars have been in progress at any moment — about 10 times the annual average globally between 1816 and 1989".
"There have been roughly 25 million 'total battle deaths' in these wars since 1945", he says, pointing out that doesn't include the wounded or dead civilians.
But civil wars no longer remain locally contained. As Professor Armitage asks:
"How do we tell civil wars apart from other kinds of wars, when so many internal conflicts spill over their countries' borders or draw in combatants from outside, as happened in Liberia and Rwanda in the 1990s as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria more recently?"
As David Armitage says, civil wars are no longer civil. Now, it seems, we can draw a line between the battlefield in Syria and the threat of another war: nuclear war.
Matter of Fact with Stan Grant is on the ABC News Channel at 9pm, Monday to Thursday.
Topics: government-and-politics, globalisation---society, nuclear-issues, unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, korea-democratic-peoples-republic-of, syrian-arab-republic
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