North Korea has conducted mass evacuation drills in towns across the country as possible ‘preparation for war,’ it was reported on Saturday, according to Daily Mail.
Sources in the isolated Communist country reported that the rare drills were being conducted in ‘secondary and tertiary cities and towns’ over the course of the last week.
There were no reported drills in the capital, Pyongyang.
News of the drills, which included so-called ‘blackout’ exercises whereby whole towns would turn out all the lights at night time so as to avoid illuminating enemy targets, was first reported by NK News.
‘I have never heard of this type of training exercises before in North Korea, but am not surprised,’ Chun In-bum, a former South Korean military officer, said.
‘They must realize how serious the situation is.’
NK News quoted an anonymous source as saying that the last time drills which approached this scale were conducted was in 2003, when North Korea carried out air raid exercises.
‘I have never heard of evacuation exercises happening before,’ one source told NK News.
News of the reported drills came in light of heightened diplomatic tensions between North Korea and the West.
Earlier on Saturday, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis issued a warning to North Korea that the country is no match for a decades-old American-South Korean alliance.
'Make no mistake - any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated, and any use of nuclear weapons by the North will be met with a massive military response that is effective and overwhelming,' he said during a news conference in Seoul on Saturday.