In Yemen War, Mercenaries Launched By Blackwater Head Were Spotted Today -- Not Good News

Charles Tiefer ,

 CONTRIBUTOR

I cover government contracting, the Pentagon and Congress.

The United Arab Emirates, as reported in today’s New York Times, has hired foreign mercenaries, from a program launched by Blackwater’s head Erik Prince, and secretly sent them to the fighting in Yemen. This is not a good sign. Blackwater private security alienated Iraqis against the United States. Now the use of foreign mercenaries will signify to the “outs” in the Middle East that the rich will buy guns-for-hire to use against them.

This program gets laid out in a New York Times piece entitled, “Emirates Secretly Sends Colombian Mercenaries to Yemen Fight.” It explains that this is “the first combat deployment for a foreign army that the Emirates has quietly built in the desert over the past five years.”  The Emirates had a brigade of 1,800 soldiers from Latin America which provided 450 troops now arriving in Yemen. It seems there are also going to be hundreds of other foreign mercenaries — Sudanese and Eritrean soldiers — brought into Yemen.

These can be viewed as a second generation of foreign mercenaries hired by the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. In the first generation, still powerful, in 1975 Saudi Arabia brought in Vinnell Corporation, an American defense contractor, to train the “Saudi Arabian National Guard.” This is a force outside the official Saudi military and the Ministry of Defense (and larger than the Saudi military). Instead, the 75,000 man National Guard reports to the King. This makes its main duty to suppress internal political unrest that challenges the state’s authoritarian structure. Vinnell receives $819 million for its maintaining 1000 employees in Saudi Arabia doing contract work with the National Guard and Royal Air Force.

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestiefer/2015/11/26/in-yemen-war-mercenaries-launched-by-blackwater-head-were-spotted-today-not-good-news/