Continuation from above:
With many of their men recruited from South Africa apartheid-era security forces, neither Nigeria nor the wider world has been keen to fete this achievement. But the fact remains that a group of mercenaries - or, to give them their polite name, a private military company - has succeeded in defeating one of the world’s bloodthirsty insurgent groups, partly through sheer dint of being willing to put boots on the ground. Britain and America, for all the help that they offered Nigeria’s army after last year’s schoolgirl kidnappings, refuse to work alongside it because of its human rights record.
So could they be used in similar fashion to defeat Isil? After, all there a few parallels between the situation in Nigeria and that in Iraq. Once again, a fanatical Islamist group is getting the better of a lousy national army, as evidenced by Isil’s capture of the Iraqi city of Ramadi last month. And once again, the West is wringing its hands about the situation, but still unwilling to put troops directly in the line of fire.
According to Mann, the answer is “yes”. First off, he says, any successful strike force would need back up from airpower and armour, just as EO’s private armies in Angola and Sierra Leone used. Those, however, are already within the Iraqi army’s reach. Otherwise, he argues, it is simply a question of building the necessary esprit de corps. “I would form a kind of Arab Legion, just like the British did in the old days” he says. “With the right training, probably a minimum of two months, you can turn pretty much anyone into good troops, as long as you have good officers and good NCOs.
“After all, if you are a soldier and you are about to go into battle, what goes through your mind? Firstly, you are sh**ing yourself. And secondly, you have to know that you are going to win. No one wants to die pointlessly. If you have a corporal who is telling you, ‘I am behind you, I am not going to let you die’, that makes a crucial difference.”
But would that be enough against Isil, whose very willingness to die in battle is their best weapon? After all, in last month’s
, one of the things that drove the Iraqi Army to flee was legions of suicide bombers, some driving explosive-rigged armoured trucks impervious to gunfire.
“Don’t get me wrong, Isis are probably very frightening up front, although I doubt they are as professionally trained as the rebels we came up in Angola,” says Mann. “Yes, I too would be scared if they come hurtling towards me with an exploding armoured truck. But it still doesn’t do anything like the damage that a main battle tank can, and it isn’t that difficult to stop a truck with two tonnes of explosives on it. You can build a ditch, for example.”
As it happens, Mann says, word has reached him on the PMC grapevine that various firms are already in contact with the Iraqi government, offering ancillary services like help with analysing intelligence data. That, though, is like the private sector offering do hip replacements instead of the NHS. Hiring them for the much bloodier surgery needed to remove Isil altogether is another question entirely, not least because of the politics involved. To many in the West, and even more in the Arab world, the notion of fighting Isil for profit rather than principle would be hugely controversial.
Then again, Mann insists neither his earlier ventures nor the Wonga coup - named after a “Wonga List” of coup found by South African police - were ever just about the “wonga”. On all three occasions, he claims, he also believed in the rightness of the mission itself. In Angola, he helped government troops defeat rebels who had seized the country’s main oil port in violation of a peace treaty. In Sierra Leone, he stopped the RUF carrying out even more massacres than it had done already. And in Equatorial Guinea, where a group of “Barrel Boys”, or oil men, asked him to topple Obiang, he says he only agreed because he thought the leader lined up to replace him would be less of a tyrant.
True, in the parts of the world that have called in Mann’s services over the years, the line between good leader and bad is often rather blurred anyway. But in Cry Havoc, he insists that wherever he went, part of the idea was to “improve the lot of the Mr and Mrs Bloggs of the country we were in”.
For all that, though, he says that if British and American warriors do end up going back to Iraq, he would rather it was as part of regular armies rather than as private soldiers. “I may have been one of the founders of Executive Outcomes,” he says. “But as a matter of principle, I would rather governments were involved where possible.”
So what, then, if Britain and America continue to refuse send in troops to Iraq? If he got a call to help Mr and Mrs Bloggs of Baghdad, would he take it on? He grins. “I might do. Although this time, I would talk to people in authority first.”
Link:
Back to bottling my Grenache
