Guns for Hire

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Alia sits down with acclaimed author and former CIA analyst, David McCloskey, to discuss the spectacular collapse of a major mercenary client in Syria. They discuss why, despite their notorious brutality, Bashar Al-Assad’s forces proved so brittle, and who the winners and losers are from the stunning rebel victory. David also talks us through CIA scenario planning around Syria and what spy services might be doing or thinking in relation to Syria right now.

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Alia is joined by the mercenaries expert Alessandro Arduino, who is also a top China analyst. They discuss recent seismic leaps in UAV technology and how the cost of drone defence is a magnitude greater than drone offense. They explore the way certain aggressive PMCs are marrying drone capabilities with their mercenary offerings, raising the spectre of air forces for hire. Alessandro also talks us through China’s developing thinking around privatised force, with some in China now pushing for more forceful security around the Belt-and-Road Initiative and the Chinese nationals constructing it.

“We have already boots on the ground, meaning an army for hire… So the next step will be to have an air force for hire. Of course, sometimes reality is faster than fiction.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Host and Nonresident Senior Fellow Alia Brahimi chats with the defence researcher Jack Margolin about his new book on the Wagner Group. They focus on its operations in support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and the central place of Syria within the Wagner subculture. They also discuss the ever-present profit motive for the Wagner Group’s leaders, as well as the ways in which grievances born in Syria festered and fostered resentment for many years, before exploding with the Wagner mutiny in June 2023. 

“[They] focused on this understanding of Slavic culture as being the inheritor of traditional values, but also attaching that to pre-Christian imagery. So you'd see a lot of runes, a lot of celebration of these Slavic pagan deities.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Alia is joined by the international criminal lawyer Katherine Gallagher to explore her litigation against a prominent PMC for war crimes at Abu Ghraib. Katherine talks us through the sixteen-year legal fight on behalf of former Iraqi detainees, the various defences invoked by CACI Premier Technology Inc., and the decision-making around whether to prosecute corporations or individual contractors. She also discusses her role in the case brought against Caterpillar Inc. for the death of Rachel Corrie, and how private corporations involved in warfare are on notice now much more so than twenty years ago.

“CACI has largely been saying since the time the first cases were filed… Anything that we were doing, we were doing in service of the United States and therefore we can't be held liable.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Alia is joined by former Blackwater contractor Morgan Lerette. In a wide-ranging conversation about Morgan's experiences, they look at Blackwater’s lax vetting procedures, the tense relationship on the ground between private contractors and the US military, the absence of long-term benefits or a support system for former Blackwater employees, and the prevalence of substance abuse and suicides. Morgan likens private military contractors to a single-serve coffee cup, to be used and discarded at will so that corporations can profit, and governments can avoid committing boots on the ground.

“I still don’t know what legal rules and regulations govern private military contractors. And I think there’s a reason for that”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Alia is joined by the Russian reporter and photojournalist, David Frenkel, to consider the staggering toll of the “Bakhmut meatgrinder”– Russia’s bloodiest battle since the Second World War. They talk through his latest report from independent Russian news platform Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service, “The Price of Bakhmut”, and David’s methodology for determining which prisoners were recruited and from where. David also examines the numbers that were killed, the question marks over whether promised death payments were made, and why the Wagner Group turned to prisons for manpower in the first place.

“This is a long tradition from Soviet times when inmates were used for building factories and deforestation in Siberia and so basically, they came back to that old idea to use inmates as soldiers.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Host Alia Brahimi speaks with  Dr Andrés Macías, a Bogota-based expert on Colombian mercenaries. They begin by discussing the explosive case of 26 Colombian nationals arrested for their part in the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse. Andrés goes on to look at the thousands of Colombians who enlist under the banner of the UAE,  what’s driving hundreds of Colombians to sign up to fight Russia in Ukraine, and what makes former Colombian soldiers so interesting to the international private security market.

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In the season two opener of the Guns for Hire podcast, Alia chats with Emmy award-winning BBC investigative journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi about her film exposing American mercenaries in Yemen. 

One of the few journalists to report from Yemen first-hand, Nawal discusses the Delaware-registered PMC contracted by the UAE to kill “terrorists”, her meetings with two of the Americans involved, and the PMC’s training of Yemeni units – including former al-Qaeda operatives – to conduct targeted assassinations. 

“He knows these guys aren’t terrorists. This was a business deal. He knew what he was doing but he will never say it.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In Episode 10 of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi is joined by Renad Mansour, an expert on Iraq, Iran and allied groups. As the region convulses from the war in Gaza, they begin by assessing reports that the Wagner Group has been tasked with transferring a Russian air defence system from Syria to Hizballah in Lebanon. 

They go on to discuss the rivalry between Russia and Iran in the Middle East, what is motivating the non-state actors leading the bid to avenge Gazans, and whether elements of the Iran-backed Shi’a militia that have fanned out across the region can be classed as mercenaries. Alia and Renad also consider parallels between the campaign in Gaza and the violence and futility of the 2003 Iraq war.

“There will be within these networks and this massive web of [Shi’a] armed groups those that are economically inclined, those that do see economic opportunity in trade or in taking advantage of conflict”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In episode nine of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi speaks with the Russia analyst Sergey Sukhankin about the 2019 arrest in Libya of the Wagner Group political operative Maksim Shugaley and the Russian propaganda campaign to free him. They discuss Russian political and media operations in Africa, from Libya to Madagascar, and how Russia fundamentally lacks the ideological and financial enticements of the Soviet Union or of China.

“This goes back to Soviet times when the Soviet Union was inviting people like [George] Bernard Shaw and many other public figures… Today Russia is using virtually the same playbook.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Lawfare is the use of legal systems for strategic advantage. One of its pioneers, the international human rights lawyer Jason McCue, joins host Alia Brahimi on episode eight of the Guns for Hire podcast. Jason describes how he first began pursuing the IRA through private civil actions in the 1990s and goes on to outline the application of these methods to the Wagner Group.  Jason and Alia also discuss whether it’s meaningful to designate mercenary groups as terrorists, if private civil actions can form the basis for criminal prosecutions, and how Jason and his law partner were personally sanctioned by the Russian state.

“Autocrats are looking for a model for asymmetric warfare against democrats and the Wagner model is definitely the model on the table, with its plausible deniability. And it’s really important for us to not only designate it but to litigate it.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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As humans share more of their experiences online for the world to see, the blank zones are shrinking. In episode seven of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi is joined by Eliot Higgins, an award-winning journalist and founder of the independent investigative collective, Bellingcat. Eliot, who was personally sued by the late mercenary leader Yevgeny Prighozin for outing him as the oligarch behind the Wagner Group, discusses the types of online open-source tools used to track mercenary activity, and how anyone with a bit of time and an internet connection can get involved.

“A mercenary might have a friend who uses social media a lot and they’re featuring a lot in these photographs, for example, and then you can start building out the networks from that.” 

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Host Alia Brahimi is joined by the Libyan security expert and Atlantic Council Nonresident Senior Fellow Emadeddin Badi. They discuss the surge of African, Syrian and Russian mercenaries in Libya since 2019, the major value-add of Wagner Group contractors in terms of utilising Libya's Soviet-era weapons and mortar and sniping capabilities, and how mercenary recruitment networks are used to smuggle migrants to Europe. The working assumption of the international community is that a future elected government will expel mercenaries from Libya, but Emadeddin argues that the mercenaries themselves pose a threat to the freeness and fairness of those very elections.

“You have smugglers that are actually putting Syrians on [mercenary] rotations to Libya in order for those Syrians to then depart for Europe. So there’s a whole new political economy around migrant smuggling.” 

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In this bumper episode on the war in Sudan, host Alia Brahimi speaks with the former US government expert on Sudan, Cameron Hudson, about the mercenary pedigree of the Rapid Support Forces and its transformation from a ragtag Arab militia into an institutional juggernaut. 

Cameron argues that this mercenary history has had a determinative impact on the conflict: it has generated a cash windfall which allows the RSF to recruit in numbers to rival the size of the national army; it has forged regional relationships that are now central to the RSF’s resupply; and it feeds a detached mercenary mentality amongst RSF fighters that facilitates war crimes and abuses. As mercenaries from multiple Sahelian states flood into Sudan, Cameron also contends that the conflict in Sudan is becoming a pan-African conflict in ways that are not yet understood.  

They discuss, too, the role of the Wagner Group in the war in Sudan and the status of Libya as a major source of resupply for the RSF. 

Alia also chats with Professor Munzoul Assal of the University of Khartoum about the danger of two parallel governments emerging in Sudan along the lines of the bifurcation in Libya. Munzoul also discusses, the presence of RSF fighters at the Sudanese border with the Central African Republic where the Wagner Group is deeply entrenched, as well as the clear and alarming possibilities for a regional conflagration.

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Host Alia Brahimi speaks with renowned Russia expert Mark Galeotti about the striking developments which saw mutinous mercenary forces from the Wagner Group take over two Russian cities and march towards Moscow. Mark argues that the plot was not picked up in a timely manner precisely because the Wagner Group is a mercenary force operating outside of the purview of counterintelligence and the units that ordinarily monitor the loyalty of the military.

“It’s likely that this is the start of the real endgame… most crucially of all it was the spectacle of the security forces in the main not joining Wagner, but nor did they act to stop Wagner. They sat back and just thought, let’s see how this all plays out.” 

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Alia is joined by the philosopher Professor Tony Coady, who examines the key characteristics of mercenaries, including the motivation for private gain. They discuss the Geneva Conventions definition of mercenaries, the gray area of military contractors in support roles, and whether it’s possible to base a moral or legal judgement on an individual’s intentions. They also consider the main moral objections to mercenaries, with Professor Coady arguing that we should do as much as possible to tone down the resort to war as a standard political option.

“Mercenaries should be treated as combatants along with regular soldiers and have the same restrictions on their conduct and, where appropriate, protections.” 

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Host Alia Brahimi talks to the Russian defense analyst Dr Pavel Luzin about what the proliferation of Russian mercenaries abroad tells us about Russia at home. They explore the domestic forces that gave rise to the Kremlin’s co-optation of Russian mercenaries, how they are funded by the Russian federal budget, and the effects mercenaries are already having on Russian society.

“Hundreds of thousands of veterans will come back sooner or later to Russia, and it will be a political economy and social disaster. It will be [a] high level of violence.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In the launch episode of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi speaks with the author and former mercenary Dr Sean McFate about his three-pronged strategy for defeating the Wagner Group. They also discuss internal dynamics within the Kremlin-linked private military company, the dangerously outsized influence of its leader on the war in Ukraine, and Sean’s argument that there’s nothing more unconventional today than a conventional war– and that this is borne out by the way that Russia is fighting in Ukraine.

“There’s this natural schism, between for-profit and not-for-profit warriors. Let’s just widen that schism in the Russian instance.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Introducing a new podcast series from the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. Taking Libya as its starting point, the Guns for Hire podcast explores the causes and implications of the growing use of mercenaries in armed conflict. Hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi. 

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.