North Korea fires artillery near the border with South Korea
North Korea fired 200 artillery rounds into waters near its disputed western maritime border with South Korea on Friday, a provocation that prompted the South’s military to ask residents of a nearby island to take shelter.
The shells fell between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. north of the disputed border, known as the Northern Limit Line, and caused no damage, South Korean officials said.
The South’s military accused the North of “threatening peace and increasing tensions” and vowed to take “according measures.” It provided no further details.
But as the South Korean military prepared for a similar firing exercise in the border waters, it asked people on Yeonpyeong Island to take shelter starting at noon, island officials said. A ferry scheduled to leave for the island at 1 p.m. from Incheon, a port west of Seoul, the South Korean capital, was also canceled.
“The military here has asked us to help evacuate people in case the North fires back if it starts its own exercise,” said Ji Young-hyeon, a government official in Yeonpyeong. “So we send out a broadcast every 30 minutes asking people to take shelter.”
People living on the island are wary of North Korean provocations, especially after the North launched an artillery and rocket barrage on the island in 2010, killing two South Korean civilians and two Marines. In retaliation, the South bombarded the North Korean coast with artillery over the water.
Yeonpyeong residents have grown accustomed to orders to leave their homes and evacuate to underground shelters. The island is littered with underground and concrete shelters, and such orders are often issued during military exercises or when North Korea has launched its missiles south.
The North’s artillery fire came a day after the South Koreans and the United States wrapped up a weeklong joint military exercise Thursday in Pocheon, north of Seoul, involving artillery, tanks, armored vehicles and A-10 Warthog aircraft were involved. On the same day, North Korea vowed retaliation, calling its enemies “mad dogs” who “will only suffer the most painful moments.”
The North Korean artillery fire on Friday was the first since North Korea scrapped an agreement it signed with South Korea in 2018 to cease hostilities, including live-fire military exercises, near the border. In November, South Korea suspended part of the agreement by resuming surveillance flights near the border to better monitor North Korea’s nuclear-armed military. North Korea immediately announced an end to the entire agreement.
When the Korean War was ended by an armistice in 1953, North Korea and the UN Command, which fought for the South, never agreed on a maritime boundary separating the two Koreas off the west coast of the Korean Peninsula. The command enforced the Northern Limit Line as a temporary border, but the North claimed a border much further south of the line.