For the last year few years, Syria has been probably one of the troubled places on earth. Since a popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad transformed into a brutal civil war and, in turn, into an international proxy conflict, the sheer scale of the destruction has had enormous ramifications across the globe, not least of which is Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

But thousands of miles from the country's capital, the Ambassador of the Syrian Arab Republic to the DPRK, Tammam Sulaiman, is busy with the day to day duties involved in maintaining one of Assad's most unlikely friendships.