More Details On North Korean Arms Sales To Al Queda

From One Free Korea and ROK Drop:

More Details On North Korea Selling Weapons to Al Qaeda & the Taliban


Published on July 30, 2010 in Afghanistan. 1 Comment

Tags: Afghanistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, North Korea.

One Free Korea has more on the North Koreans selling weapons to Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the WikiLeaks report that I posted on a few days ago. Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post report he linked to:







A powerful Afghan insurgent leader and a man identified as Osama Bin Laden’s financial adviser purchased ground-to-air missiles from North Korea in 2005, according to an uncorroborated U.S. intelligence report released by Wikileaks on Sunday.



“On 19 November 2005, Hezb-Islami party leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [sic] and Dr. Amin [no last name], Osama Bin Ladin’s financial advisor, both flew to North Korea departing from Iran,” the undated report said.



“While in North Korea, the two confirmed a deal with the North Korean government for remote controlled rockets for use against American and coalition aircraft,” said the report, whose origin could not be determined from the version published on the Wikileaks site. [Washington Post]



For those that don’t know Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is considered to be among the most ruthless and extreme of the Afghan warlords and has had deep ties to Osama bin Laden, the CIA, the Pakistani ISI, and the drug trade. So if he is traveling to Iran and then North Korea to purchase weapons, he was doing it with the complicity of the Pakistani ISI. He has also had some success shooting down coalition helicopters. As One Free Korea rightfully points out once again, how come North Korea was taken off the State Sponsors of Terrorism List?



It makes me wonder if the North Korea weapons filled planes and boats detained over the past year headed for Iran had a final destination of Afghanistan?



Anyway those of you that follow North Korea closely probably will not be surprised by this statement from Robert Koehler that sums up North Korea nicely, but it is still useful to continue to remind people why North Korea acts the way it does so brazenly:



Seriously, though, next time you here someone claim North Korea’s just afraid of America, kick him in the nuts, because no country remotely respectful of American might would even countenance selling missiles to al-Qaeda or the Taliban (or transfer nuclear technology to Syria, sink a South Korean warship, etc.). Pyongyang does what it does not because it’s frightened, but because it thinks — no, it knows — not a single bomb will fall on it.