North Korea Bombards South Korean Island in Deadly Attack

(Nov. 23) -- North Korea fired more than 100 artillery shells onto a South Korean border island today, killing two southern marines and wounding 18 people in a brazen attack that prompted the South to return fire and put its military on its highest alert. South Korea's president said he would unleash "enormous retaliation" should the North strike again.

President Barack Obama was awoken around 4 a.m. with news of the clash and was to phone South Korea's president, the BBC reported.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it "one of the gravest incidents since the end of the Korean War," a spokesman told The Associated Press. The United Nations Security Council plans to hold an emergency meeting today or Wednesday to discuss the attack, a French diplomat told Reuters.

South Korea President Lee Myung-bak called the incident an "invasion" and declared that his nation's armed forces "should unite and retaliate against [the North's] provocation with multiple-fold firepower," CNN reported.

Fires burned out of control on Yeonpyeong Island, one of South Korea's closest territories to the communist north, which houses a South Korean military base alongside the homes of about 1,700 civilians. At least three civilians and 15 South Korean soldiers were among those wounded, a defense official told The New York Times.

"I ran outside my house when my windows shattered from the blasts," resident Lee Jong-sik told the JoongAng Daily newspaper. She said blasts rang out across the island every five minutes. It was the first time in 50 years the island has suffered any attacks, she said.

Home to a sleepy fishing village famous more for a local crab delicacy than for politics or violence, Yeonpyeong (pronounced yuhn-pyuhng) lies close to the Northern Limit Line, an invisible disputed boundary between the Koreas. It's the same area where a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, sank in March -- an act blamed on North Korean torpedoes, though Pyongyang denies that. Forty-six sailors died.

"Houses and mountains are on fire, and people are evacuating," an unidentified resident told YTN television. "You can't see very well because of plumes of smoke. ... People are frightened to death."

Today's exchange of fire marks one of the peninsula's most serious clashes since the Korean War ended without a peace treaty in 1953. Military skirmishes have broken out since then, but rarely -- if ever -- has the fighting targeted civilians.

Both sides accused the other of firing first.

"The South Korean enemy, despite our repeated warnings, committed reckless military provocations of firing artillery shells into our maritime territory near Yeonpyeong Island," the BBC quoted the North's military as saying. Pyongyang "will continue to make merciless military attacks with no hesitation if the South Korean enemy dares to invade our sea territory by 0.001mm."

Seoul said that the North Korean barrage began at 2:34 p.m. and that the South Korean military returned fire more than an hour later, JoongAng reported. F-16 fighter jets were dispatched to the area, and the entire exchange of fire lasted more than two hours.

South Korea acknowledged that it had been conducting what it called regular military drills off the peninsula's west coast -- something its military does frequently -- when today's violence broke out. But it said its drills weren't aimed at the North.

"We were conducting usual military drills and our test shots were aimed toward the west, not the north," a South Korean military official told Australia's ABC News.

Lee huddled in an underground bunker at the South Korean presidential residence after dark, holding an emergency meeting with his national security-related ministers, the Los Angeles Times reported. His government called today's attack a "clear military provocation" and warned of "stern retaliation."

"Recklessly shelling mere civilians can never be tolerated," Hong Sang-pyo, senior secretary for public affairs at the presidential office, told the newspaper. "North Korea will have to bear full responsibility."

Asked about whether war might break out, South Korea's defense minister, Kim Tae-young, told the JoongAng newspaper: "Didn't it start already? We must stop it from expanding."

Hours later, North Korea's state news agency issued a somewhat bizarre report that leader Kim Jong-Il and his heir apparent, his youngest son, toured a soy sauce factory and medical school today in Pyongyang, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. The 68-year-old North Korean dictator, suspected to be in poor health after a stroke, recently designated his twenty-something son as a four-star general and his likely successor.

Today's clash also comes amid heightened tension over the North's disputed nuclear program. Last weekend, an American scientist just back from Korea described touring a previously unknown nuclear laboratory near Pyongyang -- raising suspicions that the North may be forging ahead with its nuclear activities more quickly than the West thought.

Obama dispatched his North Korea envoy, Stephen Bosworth, who told reporters in Beijing today that Pyongyang initiated today's clashes, Bloomberg News reported. The U.S. and China share the view that "such conflict is very undesirable," he said.

Washington, which has tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, also condemned the attack and called on North Korea to "halt its belligerent action," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, according to AP. He said the U.S. is "firmly committed" to South Korea's defense and to the "maintenance of regional peace and stability."

The top European Union diplomat, Baroness Catherine Ashton, issued a statement calling on North Korea to "refrain from any action that risks further escalation and to fully respect the Korean Armistice Agreement," the BBC reported.