Simon Mann: 'We can use mercenaries to defeat Isil'
The former SAS man who plotted the disastrous 'Wonga coup' says a private army could be used to defeat Islamic State
It is late morning in a cafe in London’s Sloane Square, and over coffee and croissants,
is sketching out a plot to topple the Islamic State. Perhaps not suprisingly for someone who spent five years in jail for his role in the botched “Wonga Coup”, he makes it clear that he has no immediate plans to do so. But if someone did ring up for his help - just as they did in Equatorial Guinea, and before that in Angola and Sierra Leone - here is how he’d go about it.
“If someone from the Iraqi government said ‘Okay Simon, we have got the money for you to put together a 2,000-strong force’, I would tell them ‘yes, we could probably do something useful’,” says the Eton-educated former Scots Guard and SAS man. “Isil are probably more terrifying than they are competent, and it all comes down to training and experience at the end of the day.
“We know that the Iraqi army were not being properly led, paid or equipped and that equates to disaster. How did anyone expect it to end?”
Many other military minds have been asking that very same question in recent weeks, as this month’s anniversary of Isil’s take-over of northern Iraq prompts bouts of gloomy soul-searching. On Monday,
for training Iraqi forces to fight Isil, while last month, the former head of the British army,
by sending in troops again.
Yet if there is one thing that the bickering generals and politicians could probably agree on, it is that whatever the solution, none of them will be asking Mann to provide it. This after all, is the fellow who ended up being sentenced to 34 years in Equatorial Guinea’s Black Beach prison, after his 2004 plot to overthrow the country’s dictator, Teodoro Obiang, was rumbled in advance.
As “banged up abroad” predicaments went, it made Midnight Express look like a holiday. And as his many critics were quick to point out, the plot he had tried to hatch seemed so improbable it sounded like a badly-written thriller. Not only had he enlisted as a financier, Lady Thatcher’s son Mark (who has always denied any knowledge of the plot and only admitted to breaking anti-mercenary legislation in South Africa by agreeing to charter a helicopter) - never the best option for keeping things low-profile - news of the plan had leaked out months before.
Mann pressed ahead, convinced he had the tacit backing of Western intelligence, only to be arrested with 69 others during a weapons pick-up in Zimbabwe, which then obligingly extradited him to face Obiang’s tender mercies in Equatorial Guinea. To the surprise of many,
.
Yet despite his contribution to the mercenary trade’s long history of infamy - a subject on which he is now writing a book - the reason the coup backers came to Mann in the first place was because he had a very good record at what he did. His previous firm, Executive Outcomes, halted rebel movements in their tracks in both Angola in 1993 and Sierra Leone in 1995, the latter against the drug-crased, limb-chopping rebels of the Revolutionary United Front. On both occasions it was in support of legitimate governments, and while some may have questioned the millions they were paid, nobody ever doubted their effectiveness.
Indeed, in person, it is hard to recognise him as the forlorn figure that he cut at his trial, sitting handcuffed in a courtroom in Equatorial Guinea’s sweltering capital, Malabo. The scraggy beard is gone, and in place of the prison fatigues is a smart pinstripe suit that is more City banker than soldier of fortune. He comes across as charming and thoughtful, and while he still works as a security consultant, much of his time since his release has focused on writing and promoting his memoir, Cry Havoc.
Yet earlier this year, one of his old South African partners,
, this time fielding a force of fighters to help Nigeria defeat the Islamists of Boko Haram. As the Telegraph reported last month, the group spent three months fighting alongside the Nigerian military, bringing with them years of hard-won experience in South Africa’s apartheid-era bush wars. They had only around 100 men on the ground, but even in that brief time, they turned a demoralised and badly-led army into a fighting machine that finally pushed Boko Haram from its north-eastern strongholds.
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