Mercenaries’ story offers glimpse into chaos in Libya
Two former British marines piloted their boats, a pair of militarygrade inflatables, across the Mediterranean from Malta. Six helicopters were flown in from Botswana using falsified papers. The rest of the team — soldiers of fortune from South Africa, Britain, Australia and the United States — arrived from a staging area in Jordan.
To anyone who asked, the mercenaries who slipped into the warpocked port of Benghazi, Libya, last summer said they had come to guard oil and gas facilities.
In fact, United Nations investigators later determined, their mission was to fight alongside Libyan commander Khalifa Hifter in his all-out assault on the capital, Tripoli, for which they were to be paid $80 million.
It quickly went wrong. A dispute erupted with Hifter, a notoriously mercurial leader, over the quality of the aircraft.
On July 2, after just four days in Libya, the mercenaries scrambled for their speedboats and roared out to sea, headed for the safety of Malta.
Although short-lived, the botched mission offers a telling illustration of the melee in Libya, where a war driven by powerful foreign sponsors — principally the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia and Egypt — has created a lucrative playground for smugglers, arms dealers, mercenaries and other profiteers who flout an international arms embargo with little fear of consequences.
Libya is a singular magnet for its combination of oil wealth and scrappy standards of combat. With Russian, Syrian, Sudanese, Chadian and now Western mercenaries drawn to the fight, it has the rare distinction of being a mercenaryon-mercenary war — sometimes, in the case of Syrians, with men from the same country fighting each other.
“It’s a free-for-all,” said Wolfram Lacher, a Libya expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “Everyone is bringing ever more absurd types of weapons and fighters into Libya, with Syrians on both sides, and nobody is stopping them.”
Libya, a sparsely populated oil-rich nation, has been mired in chaos since the ouster of its decadeslong dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, by a U.S.-backed coalition in 2011. Peace talks established a fragile U.N.-backed government in Tripoli that Hifter aims to overthrow.
Since his first offensive in 2014, Hifter has been backed by an array of foreign forces.
In the past year, a powerful Kremlin-backed private army, the Wagner Group, turbocharged his flagging assault on Tripoli.
But Turkey joined the fight on behalf of Tripoli in January and has thrown Hifter’s campaign into disarray.
A large contingent of Russian fighters and their weapons retreated from the front lines south of the capital over the weekend and were flown in three planes to a Hifter stronghold, Reuters reported. Hifter’s powerful foreign sponsors will likely determine his next move.
The abortive mercenary expedition last summer was organized and financed by a network of secretive companies in the United Arab Emirates, according to a confidential report submitted to the U.N. Security Council in February.
The companies are controlled or part-owned by Christiaan Durrant, an Australian businessman and former fighter pilot who is a close associate of Erik Prince, America’s most famous mercenary entrepreneur.
Prince, whose close ties to the Trump administration have come under Congressional scrutiny in recent years, has provided private militia forces for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates and the leading foreign sponsor of Hifter’s war in Libya.
U.N. investigators are examining whether Prince played any role in the failed mercenary operation. Through a spokesman, Prince said he had “nothing whatsoever to do with any alleged private military operation in Libya.”
The team of 20 mercenaries that deployed to Benghazi in June was led by Steve Lodge, a former South African air force officer who also served in the British military and worked as a private military contractor in Nigeria.
The others were also exmilitary — 11 South Africans, five Britons, two Australians and one American, a trained pilot.
Their mission was to prevent shipments of Turkishsupplied weapons from reaching the government in Tripoli by sea.