O Il-jong was born in 1954 in
Pyongyang. A graduate of economics at the Kim Il Sung University and Kim Il Sung Military University (he graduated from the academy only in the 90s). He is the third son of
O Jin-u, the
Minister of the Defense of the North Korea who died in 1995, who for years was one of Kim Il Sung's closest associates and one of the most important figures in the North Korean political system. In the 1980s, O Il-jong worked in diplomacy, he was the military attaché of the DPRK embassy in Egypt. Then, from 1985, he worked at a state-owned foreign trade company. In 1989 he became the commander of the regiment and then a brigade. He received the general nomination for the rank of major-general () in April 1992. From November 1994 he was the commander of the 26th Division in the
4th Corps of the Korean People's Army. During the
3rd Conference of the Workers' Party of Korea on September 28, 2010, he was appointed director of the
Military Department of the
WPK Central Committee, (replacing
Kim Song-gyu), was promoted to a two-star Major-General, and was also a member of the Central Committee for the first time. In April 2011 he was promoted to the rank of colonel general. After the death of
Kim Jong Il in December 2011, O Il-jong found himself on the high, 40th place in the
232-person Funeral Committee. Around the end of 2019 at the 5th plenary of the
7th Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, he was believed to have replaced
Choe Pu-il as the director of the Military Department. On 10 January 2021, O Il-jong was elected as a member of the
Politburo of the Workers' Party of Korea. He was promoted to a
four star general on 14 April 2022, by order of
Kim Jong Un. He was excluded from the
9th Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea. ==References==