North Korean authorities are using last month’s DMZ landmine explosion to justify tougher military drills for high school students. In anti-South Korea lectures, officials are telling students that Seoul fabricated the September 2026 incident to provoke a war.
A source in North Pyongan province told Daily NK on Friday that the campaign targets the Youth Guards. The student paramilitary organization previously went by the name Red Youth Guards. Founded in 1970 under Kim Il Sung, it trains teenage students in marching, tactics and shooting ahead of military service.
On Oct. 17, a high school in Uiju county, North Pyongan province, held a lecture for its Youth Guards members.
The lecturer said that “the South Korean military is pinning the blame for its own accident on our army.” The lecturer also accused Seoul of “picking a fight over our legitimate exercise of sovereignty on the southern border and stirring up war.”
For many students, the lecture was their first exposure to the DMZ incident, the source said. Afterward, some students said South Korea “hurt its own people and then pinned it on us.” Others claimed that Seoul was “picking a fight because it wants a war.”
The lectures appear aimed at denying North Korean responsibility while casting Seoul as the aggressor on the Korean Peninsula.
Authorities have also ordered the Youth Guards to hold emergency mobilization drills once a week until further notice. The order uses heightened inter-Korean tensions as cover for a sharp increase in military training for students.
Pyongyang denies blame for DMZ landmine explosion
The explosion occurred on Sept. 21, wounding three South Korean soldiers clearing a patrol route in the western DMZ. The site lay just south of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), the de facto border inside the Demilitarized Zone.
On Oct. 5, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that a plastic antipersonnel mine caused the blast. Investigators found that North Korean troops had planted the mine on the southern side of the MDL.
The finding drew on a joint field investigation with the United Nations Command and analysis by the National Forensic Service. The U.S.-led command oversees the 1953 armistice, while the forensic service is South Korea’s state crime laboratory.
Pyongyang, however, flatly denies responsibility and insists that Seoul fabricated the entire incident.
Kim Yo Jong, the sister of leader Kim Jong Un, has issued a string of statements on the dispute. Kim, a department director of the Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee, calls the border fortification work a sovereign right. She has also condemned South Korea’s warning broadcasts and warning shots and even raised the possibility of a military response.
North Korea began fortifying the MDL in 2024 after Kim Jong Un declared the two Koreas “two hostile states.” Since then, North Korean troops have laid mines, strung barbed wire and built barriers along the line.
While denying responsibility abroad, Pyongyang is using the incident at home to expand training across its civilian paramilitary groups. Including the Youth Guards suggests the regime sees the standoff as a chance to turn teenagers against South Korea.
The stepped-up drills have drawn complaints from some parents in North Pyongan province, however.
“Parents aren’t happy that children who should be studying keep getting pulled out for military training,” the source said. “No one knows who is really responsible for the landmine incident, but parents object to dragging children into political matters.”
This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
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October 26, 2026 at 06:20AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)