The recent sanctions on North Korea have attracted much attention to what is known in the North’s official parlance as “hard currency-earning activity,” a multitude of actions aimed at earning income in foreign currency. The most common type of such activity is, of course, regular trade, but there are other economic undertakings which send money to the coffers of North Korea – and the ever-growing export of labor is one such activity.

Nobody knows for sure how many North Korean workers are employed at the numerous factories, farms and construction sites across the globe – the estimates vary between 70,000 and 150,000. The workers are employed in three very different regions – Russia, China and the Middle East, and while there has been some reporting done on the North Korean workers in China and Russia, the life of the North Koreans in the Middle East remains almost unknown.