Eleven thousand North Korean troops sent by Kim Jung Un to aid his close ally Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine, include a significant contingent of Special Forces with recent combat experience in Syria and trained to fight South Korea’s powerful army. Much of the media has been downplaying the threat posed by the North Koreans, describing them as “inexperienced,” “underfed,” and generally unfit by the Wall Street Journal, London Times, and several other major news outlets.

It’s said that Kim’s troops can’t operate Russian equipment because they are “unfamiliar” with sophisticated weapon systems and the language barrier. According to widely circulated but unverified Ukrainian reports, 18 have supposedly defected and The Guardian quotes cocky Ukrainian soldiers who say they are learning Korean to tell them to surrender after a North Korean unit reportedly came under fire last week.

“Never underestimate your enemy” is the first tenet of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and if the widespread public perceptions of the North Koreans deployed to Ukraine are any reflection of U.S. and NATO intelligence assessments, the West may be violating that golden rule.

While the bulk of North Korea’s mass conscript army of 1.2 million, the fourth largest in the world, is undoubtedly in poor shape, with many recruits serving as little more than glorified slave labor, its special forces, or 11th Storm Corps selected from about 200,000 elite sections of the armed forces, are highly trained in unconventional warfare, sabotage, deep infiltration, and reconnaissance operations, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

They have recently fought in Syria as a key ground component of Russia’s large scale support for the regime of Bashir Al Assad against a U.S. backed insurgent coalition. Many North Korean “Storm” officers have operated and trained with Russian Spetsnaz and speak Russian.

A 2018 report by the editorial staff of Military Watch magazine revealed that “on March 2016, representatives of the Western backed (Syrian) insurgent forces stated that North Korean military personnel had been deployed for combat operations in the country on Damascus’ behalf.” The head of the High Negotiations Committee named “two North Korean units” which he described as “lethal” at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, and these Korean personnel have proven an invaluable asset to Syrian government forces. (READ MORE from Martin Arostegui: Swallowing Eastern Ukraine Piecemeal)

Deploying special forces to Syria remains an effective means of contributing to Damascus’ war effort, and the latest in a long line of North Korean military interventions to support friendly states against Western aligned adversaries. With anti-government groups deploying some of the latest Western made weaponry, and European and U.S. special forces having been found to operate alongside a number of them in the field, combat in Syria is likely to provide the Korean military with invaluable experience in countering the latest Western arms and tactics — invaluable knowledge which can be passed onto KPA (Korean Peoples Army) units at home in future.

Experience in urban fighting and capturing fortified enemy territory, operations which the KPA has seldom performed since the Korean War, is also highly invaluable.” The North Korean military personnel also manned Russian air defense missiles and flew MIG fighters for Syria, according to Military Watch.

The Western media mantra about North Koreans not being in combat since the 1950s Korean War is highly misleading. During the late 1960s, North Korean SOF conducted a series of deep infiltration missions into South Korean territory across the heavily fortified DMZ that often involved moving through layers of obstacles, mine fields, watch posts and South Korean patrols.

They staged about 700 raids into South Korea, killing hundreds of South Korean personnel and 70 American servicemen, according to the defense magazine Grey Dynamics. While the three year “Quiet War” ultimately failed in the objective of sparking an insurgency in South Korea, it provided the basis for the selection and training of elite North Korean units that formed the 11th Storm Corps now organized into 20 specialized brigades, whose preparation includes use of biological and chemical weapons.

 Storm Corps’ light infantry brigades are normally attached to regular units as shock troops, similar to the way that Spetsnaz operate in the Russian army. Storm Reconnaissance and Sniper brigades trained to operate and survive behind enemy lines offer further skills that Putin urgently needs.

He has to dislodge Ukrainian forces entrenched in the Russian border region of Kursk, without diverting elite Russian forces from Ukraine’s eastern industrial region of Donbass where they are making steady gains and which he must control before agreeing to peace negotiations being pushed by the incoming U.S. administration of president Donald Trump.

According to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, two or three North Korean brigades commanded by their own officers are “making their way to Kursk,” which was invaded last August by elite Ukrainian mechanized and airborne troops that are now struggling to hold onto a 300 — 400 mile perimeter, amidst concerted Russian counter attacks.

Locating and destroying control bunkers of Ukraine’s lethal fleet of robotic drones and otherwise eroding Ukrainian rear positions in Kursk was assigned to a Russian naval infantry brigade, recently transferred to the area, which has endured heavy casualties. It’s being reinforced by North Korean special forces which have been undergoing initial joint training with the Russian marines for night-time operations using advanced thermal goggles according to Ukrainian intelligence reports.

Korean racial characteristics are similar to Russians from eastern Siberia, allowing them to blend into Putin’s military formations, They are wearing Russian uniforms, armed with the latest AK-12 assault rifles and even issued Russian ID documents, according to reports on the BBC. Ukrainian signals intelligence indicate that the North Korean units are transported to the front in unmarked trucks and called “K battalions” in Russian communications. (READ MORE: Has Latin America Become a Base for Iran’s Terrorism?)

According to Western news reports citing Ukrainian sources, the North Koreans are “terrified” and won’t survive Kursk’s plain open battlefields, different from Korea’s hill and mountain terrain to which they are accustomed. Few may be expected to make it back from Kursk but their record of survival under extreme conditions, suicidal devotion to their “divine supreme leader” to whom they swear daily allegiance and mission orientation, should make them a match to Ukraine’s SOF, trained by the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group and the British SAS.

When three members of the North Korean special forces became stranded south of the 38th Parallel during an incursion of South Korea in 1996, they managed to evade several thousand highly trained South Korean soldiers tasked with finding them for 49 days. By the time two of them were finally found and eliminated they had killed twelve South Korean soldiers and caused 27 other casualties.

The remaining operative was never found, and is assumed to have successfully returned to North Korea. In a 1983 assassination attempt against South Korean president Chun Doon during a visit to Burma, the clandestine North Korean team that planted explosives which killed his top military aides collectively ingested suicide pills to avoid capture.

Putin doesn’t mind sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers to the Ukrainian meat grinder and North Korea’s Kim can be expected to care even less about expending a few thousand of his special operatives for what he may get in return from Russia. Few details are known about the “mutual military assistance” pact signed between Putin and Jung last June, but the October 31 launch of North Korea’s new HS-19 ICBM last month, capable of reaching the U.S., may well have been facilitated by upgraded technological support from Moscow which is also backing Pyongyang in the protests raised by the U.S. and South Korea at the UN.