North Koreans volunteer in droves to fight "evil U.S. imperialists"

Hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens are ready to enlist in their country’s armed forces and fight the United States according to official state media sources. 

North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper stated that official tallies revealed 800,000 North Koreans enlisted in the Korean People’s Army on March 17th.

“The young vanguard,” as the newspaper called the volunteers, “turned out at once in the struggle to defend the country and annihilate the enemy.”

North Korea’s new volunteers were mostly composed of students according to Rodong Sinmun, though a Reuters report noted that some workers also enlisted as well. 

“The soaring enthusiasm of young people to join the army is a demonstration of the unshakeable will of the younger generation,” the newspaper wrote about the volunteers. 

Rodong Sinmun added that the volunteers showed their willingness “to mercilessly wipe out the war maniacs making last-ditch efforts to eliminate our precious socialist country.”

The newspaper continued saying the recruits would help “achieve the great cause of national reunification” and that they showed a “clear manifestation of their ardent patriotism.”

Youths turned out from all across North Korea to volunteer and several universities were singled out for their student's vows to “reliably defend” their “beloved country.”

News of North Korea’s new recruits came just hours after Kim Jong-un's government confirmed that it had successfully test-launched one of its Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

“The launching drill of the strategic weapon serves as an occasion to give a stronger warning to the enemies intentionally escalating the tension in the Korean peninsula,” wrote Korean Central News Agency in reference to ongoing South Korean and U.S. military drills on the peninsula. 

The missile was launched from Pyongyang's airport according to the North Korean news agency and traveled to an altitude of 6045 km before landing in the waters east of Korea.

“The drill confirmed the war readiness of the ICBM unit and the exceptional militancy of the DPRK’s strategic forces and strictly verified their reliability,” the news agency added. 

According to a Reuters report, the missile launch occurred just hours before South Korean Yoon Suk Yeol was set to fly to Tokyo for a historic summit with Fumio Kashida. 

The summit signaled the first visit by a South Korean president to Japan in twelve years and “highlighted how the two U.S. allies have been brought closer by North Korea's frequent missile launches,” according to Sakura Murakami and Ju-min Park of Reuters.

On March 13th, South Korean and U.S. military forces launched their largest military exercise in several years according to Hyung-jin Kim of The Associated Press.

“The South Korean-U.S. drills include a computer simulation and several combined field training exercises,” Kim wrote in a report published the same day the drills began