Sierra Leone, officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It shares its southeastern border with Liberia and is bordered by Guinea to the north. With a land area of 71,740 km2 (27,699 sq mi), Sierra Leone has a tropical climate and with a variety of environments ranging from savannas to rainforests. According to the 2015 census, Sierra Leone has a population of 7,092,113, with Freetown serving as both the capital and largest city. The country is divided into five administrative regions, which are further subdivided into 16 districts.
A mercenary, also called a merc, soldier of fortune, or hired gun, is a private individual who joins an armed conflict for personal profit, is otherwise an outsider to the conflict, and is not a member of any other official military. Mercenaries fight for money or other forms of payment rather than for political interests.
A private military company (PMC) or private military and security company (PMSC) is a private company providing armed combat or security services for financial gain. PMCs refer to their personnel as "security contractors" or "private military contractors".
Executive Outcomes is a private military company (PMC) founded in South Africa in 1989 by Eeben Barlow, a former lieutenant-colonel of the South African Defence Force. It later became part of the South African-based holding company Strategic Resource Corporation. The company was reestablished in 2020.
The Sandline affair was a political scandal that became one of the defining moments in the history of Papua New Guinea, and particularly the conflict in Bougainville. It brought down the government of Sir Julius Chan, and took Papua New Guinea to the verge of a military revolt. The event was named after Sandline International, a UK-based private military company.
Jerry Singirok was the commander of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force throughout the Sandline affair of 1997.
Simon Francis Mann is a British mercenary and former officer in the SAS. He trained to be an officer at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Scots Guards. He later became a member of the SAS. On leaving the military, he co-founded Sandline International with fellow ex-Scots Guards Colonel Tim Spicer in 1996. Sandline operated mostly in Angola and Sierra Leone, but a contract with the government of Papua New Guinea attracted a significant amount of negative publicity in what became known as the Sandline affair.
Timothy Simon Spicer, is a former British Army officer, and former CEO of the private security company Aegis Defence Services. He served in the Falklands War and in Northern Ireland. He founded Sandline International, a private military company which closed in April 2004. He is the author of three books: An Unorthodox Soldier: Peace and War and the Sandline Affair (2000), A Dangerous Enterprise: Secret War at Sea (2021) and A Suspicion of Spies: Risk, Secrets and Shadows - the Biography of Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale will be published on 12 September 2024.
Koidu Town is the capital and largest city of the Kono District in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone. Its population is 128,030 based on the 2015 census. It is the fifth largest city in Sierra Leone by population, after Freetown, Kenema, Bo and Makeni. It lies approximately 280 miles east of Freetown, and about 60 miles north of Kenema.
The Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002), or the Sierra Leonean Civil War, was a civil war in Sierra Leone that began on 23 March 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), with support from the special forces of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), intervened in Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow the Joseph Momoh government. The resulting civil war lasted almost 11 years, and had over 50,000, up to 70,000, casualties in total; an estimated 2.5 million people were displaced during the conflict.
Rakesh Saxena is an Indian convicted criminal, financier and trader in the derivatives market. He is accused of embezzlement in the 1990s from his work as treasury adviser to the Bangkok Bank of Commerce (BBC) and is widely reputed to have been engaged in dozens of high risk ventures and deals throughout the world over the previous three decades.
Aegis Defence Services is a British private military and private security company with overseas offices in Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Somalia and Mozambique. It is part of the Aegis Group of companies, which includes Aegis LLC, which is based in the United States. It was founded in 2002 by Tim Spicer, who was previously CEO of the private military company Sandline International; Jeffrey Day, an entrepreneur; and Mark Bullough and Dominic Armstrong, former investment bankers.
Lt-Col. Eeben Barlow is a veteran of the South African Defence Force and was the second-in-command of its elite special forces 32 Battalion Reconnaissance Wing. He later served in Military Intelligence as an agent handler and later as an operative and region commander in the ultra-secret Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a covert division of Special Forces. He founded the private military contractor (PMC) Executive Outcomes (EO) in 1989, and was involved in providing counter-insurgency as well as peacekeeping forces in Africa and Asia. Barlow resigned from Executive Outcomes in July 1997 and the company closed its doors on 31 December 1998. Barlow is the former chairman of STTEP, but also lectures on military matters at defence colleges and universities. Some consider Eeben Barlow the grandfather of modern private military companies as the founder of Executive Outcomes. Shannon Sedgwick Davis stated in her book about an alliance to stop the atrocities of the Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army, "Eeben Barlow and the trainers, your sweat and sacrifice translated to lives saved, thank you."
Anthony Leslie Rowland Buckingham is a British businessman and oil industry executive with a significant shareholding in Heritage Oil Corporation. Heritage is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange since 1999. In 2008, Heritage was listed on the London Stock Exchange. Buckingham's direct and indirect shareholding is estimated to represent 33% of Heritage. This share was reduced in November 2007 via a share placement made through JP Morgan and Canaccord.
Al J. Venter is a South African war journalist, documentary filmmaker, and author of more than forty books who also served as an Africa and Middle East correspondent for Jane's International Defence Review. The surname is pronounced "fen-ter".
Neall Ellis is a South African military aviator and mercenary. Raised in Bulawayo, he joined the South African Air Force after a brief stint in the Rhodesian Army. As a helicopter pilot he was awarded the Honoris Crux decoration in 1983, and later attained field rank. After retiring from the SAAF he contracted for various private military corporations, including Executive Outcomes and Sandline International. During the civil war in Sierra Leone, he and his Mi-24 crew held off Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces almost single-handedly. He also provided fire support for British troops during Operation Barras.
Peter Alfred Penfold was a British diplomat who was the second youngest governor of the British Virgin Islands and was High Commissioner to the Republic of Sierra Leone. His career began in 1963, when he joined the Foreign Service as a clerical officer. Two years into his career, he was posted to the British embassy in Bonn, West Germany, and two years after that to Nigeria. From 1970 to 1972, Penfold served as a "floater" in Latin America, filling in as necessary for staff at British missions in the region. He served in Mexico during the 1970 football world cup, and on St Vincent, where he was responsible for organising an evacuation after a volcanic eruption. After Latin America, Penfold briefly served in Canberra, before returning to London to take a post in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). He earned early promotion to second secretary in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he was responsible for reporting on the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the Eritrean War of Independence and was still in the country during the revolution, in which the pro-Western emperor was overthrown. After completing his tour in Ethiopia, Penfold served as information officer in Port of Spain and then as first secretary in the West Africa Department of the FCO.
The Bougainville conflict, also known as the Bougainville Civil War, was a multi-layered armed conflict fought from 1988 to 1998 in the North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) between PNG and the secessionist forces of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), and between the BRA and other armed groups on Bougainville. The conflict was described by Bougainvillean President John Momis as the largest conflict in Oceania since the end of World War II in 1945, with an estimated 15,000–20,000 Bougainvilleans dead, although lower estimates place the toll at around 1,000–2,000.
The Wagner Group, officially known as PMC Wagner, is a Russian private military company (PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin. The Wagner Group has used infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces. Evidence suggests that Wagner has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing it to have plausible deniability for military operations abroad, and hiding the true casualties of Russia's foreign interventions.
Mercenaries have played a vital role in the modern history of Africa from the independent movements of the 1960s up until the 2020s. Broadly the mercenary actions can be broken into two types of related actors, which can then be examined regionally. Mercenaries have been used to both influence conflicts in order to support or attack governments friendly to various foreign governments, notably the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and many other foreign actors. This is mainly done to maintain spheres of influence, and create friendly governments. This was most prevalent during the Cold War era, but continues to this day, notably with the Russian Wagner Group. The second group of actions are mercenaries working on behalf of large multinational corporations, helping to secure resource extraction areas. Oftentimes the support of mercenary groups to keep a leader or government in power comes at a large cost, that the government is unable to pay, who then offers the mercenary company or Private Military Company (PMC) rights to resource extraction areas such as diamond mines, oil fields or other valuable natural resource to pay for the services of the mercenary company. This has notably happened in Sierra Leone. Legislation has been adopted by the OAU as well as the IRCC, and various African governments to attempt to regulate or ban the use and creation of mercenary companies. This legislation has been mostly unsuccessful largely because world powers such as the United States and Russia continue to condone the use of mercenaries as a tool of state craft. Many modern scholars consider the use of mercenaries in Africa to be a form of neocolonialism.
