John Lechner
The Austrian, an investigation by the Insider found, wanted his own mercenary company after the GRU arranged for him to LARP as a Russian soldier in Syria alongside Wagner’s head of intelligence, Anatoly Karazii. Marsalek envisioned his RSB not only demining the cement factory but training an army of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Libyan mercenaries to guard “the country’s southern border and [restrict] migration flows at gunpoint . . . mercenaries could be outfitted with state-of-the-art body cams to record ‘awesome video material’ of them shooting people.”
Though it seems he wasn’t directly involved in the GRU’s deal, Prigozhin was well embedded within its network, which had now effectively monopolized the Libya portfolio. And in the end, Prigozhin’s capacity to move men and material, far larger than anything Krinitsyn or Jan Marsalek could muster, paved the way for Wagner to service Haftar’s need for mercenaries. It helped, too, that Prigozhin was already working with the UAE in Sudan, where Emirati officials allegedly connected Wagner’s boss with the head of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Muhammad Dagalo “Hemedti.”
There are two pillars supporting the United Arab Emirates’ foreign policy. The first is security. Abu Dhabi seeks to counter Islamism and jihadism before it reaches its shores. The second, advanced by Dubai, is commerce: the desire to see the UAE as a twenty-first-century Venetian empire. Despite the population boom in places like Dubai, there are few UAE citizens.
With only one million nationals and incredible oil wealth, the country can outsource its foreign policy priorities. In Prigozhin, UAE officials found the perfect partner. As one Russian intelligence official put it: “When you have military equipment, military technologies and skills, trained and motivated personnel, and someone has money, then a form of cooperation is always found and easy . . . why not shake the hand with the money in it?” Abu Dhabi would provide the financing in Libya, and Prigozhin would supply the men.
In October 2018, those men were spotted at Al-Watiya Air Base, a slice of land the Haftar’s LNA controlled in western Libya. Months later, in early 2019, Haftar’s forces launched an offensive on Libya’s southern region, officially an effort to oust “Chadian gangs.” He took the main cities of Sabha and Ubari and captured the Sharara oil fields, bringing the majority of Libya’s oil production under his control. Haftar, though, wanted more than just the south: he wanted Libya’s capital.
On April 4, 2019, Haftar launched a surprise attack on Tripoli. The head of the Tripoli government (GNA), Fayez al-Sarraj, promised to resist and launched a counteroffensive, dubbed the “Volcano of Anger.” Seizing Tripoli, home to 1.2 million residents and a host of militias armed to the teeth, would prove no easy task.
But Haftar had sold outside powers, particularly the UAE—but also the Trump administration—on the notion he could unite Libya. The UAE poured weapons, cash, and drones into the conflict. In mid-April, Haftar left Saudi Arabia with more funding. And while the French denied any connection, the LNA general had met French diplomats just two weeks prior to the attack. Soon French weapons also appeared on the battlefield. Abu Dhabi would provide the financing in Libya, and Prigozhin would supply the men.
Everyone wanted a slice of the offensive. Security entrepreneurs flocked to Haftar. Christiaan Durrant—a former Australian fighter pilot, founder of security firm Lancaster 6, and a good friend of Blackwater founder Erik Prince—also had men in Benghazi.
According to a confidential UN report, a few days after he started his attack, Haftar met Prince in Cairo. Prince proposed an $80 million contract to the Libyan National Army, which would cover the provision of “assault aircraft, cyber capabilities and the ability to intercept ships at sea.” He outlined a program to kidnap and kill high-value targets in west Libya as well.
The plan, according to the UN, swiftly fell apart. The Jordanians cancelled a deal to sell Cobra helicopters, forcing Prince’s team to look for backups. They procured some utility helicopters from South Africa, then supplied crop dusters previously outfitted with weapons through Bulgarian and Serbian companies.
Durrant contends the UN investigation mixed up all sorts of timelines and geographies. “There’s nothing ‘united’ about the United Nations,” he later told me. “I’ve been in countries where the UN is feeding the rebels, criminals really, on the other side.”
It was Durrant, not Erik Prince, who rolled into Libya quickly, after a separate deal in Jordan fell through. “In our line of work, the first mover picks up most of the business,” he continued. “So, we were on the ground early talking not just with Haftar, but with the National Oil Corporation of Libya and U.S. government logistics.” As a former associate of Prince’s company, Frontier Services Group, Durrant had worked on crop dusters before and was well positioned to purchase planes and other assets for his own company.
After landing in Benghazi to assemble civilian helicopters, Durrant’s team were pulled in front of Haftar. “They were told to put a machine gun on the helicopter and fly it over Tripoli.” When the team refused—the mission was both “suicide and illegal”—Haftar’s men were furious and started waving guns around. The twenty unarmed men decided they needed to get out of dodge. In the dead of night, Durrant’s men escaped through Benghazi to reach two small inflatable boats, then crossed nearly two hundred miles of the Mediterranean to arrive safely in Malta.
With Trump in the White House, Durrant believes, there were those in the UN interested in using Erik Prince as a means to link the U.S. president to a “scandal.” “Everyone else, Britain, France, is sending in javelins, meanwhile we get reams of reports written up about a potentially armed crop duster.”
(An Austrian court later found that the crop dusters did not constitute war material.) With regards to the assassination program, Durrant notes there’s nothing illegal in proposing business. “I will do any work, as long as it’s legal,” he added, “and on the side of the right guys. If we are helping the U.S. stamp out terrorism, and we are able to make money doing it, then that’s great.”
“By August 2019, we knew Russian mercenaries were in the country,” Heithem, a militia commander, told me when I met him outside his former base a few years later. Rocket blasts had ripped the building half-open. Concrete, furniture, cooking utensils—the scaffolding of daily life—pooled onto the street below. It was early 2020, and the front line had settled where we now stood, in Ein Zara, a suburb south of Tripoli. In his late twenties, stocky, and shy, Heithem, at the time part of an anti-Haftar militia from Benghazi, stared down the enemy’s old position in a whitewashed house a few hundred yards away.
Walking softly across the rubble-strewn courtyard, Heithem waved me over. “Wagner played a logistical role in August, not an offensive one. Then in October, the guys in that white house started to look very different, like special forces. They had special vests, cameras on their helmets, different equipment.” The mercenaries started to make a difference. “The LNA usually takes four or five shells to hit a target,” Heithem added. “The Russians were hitting us immediately.”
Wagner’s intervention put Tripoli’s forces in a dangerous position. Growing desperate, the head of Tripoli’s GNA government, al-Sarraj, signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkey in November. The memorandum established maritime boundaries that effectively cut a direct line between Libya and Turkey and prompted immediate protests from Turkey’s rivals in the east Mediterranean—Greece, Egypt, and Cyprus—where Turks and Cypriots were competing for oil blocs.
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in return, ramped up his support to the beleaguered Tripoli government, shipping in air defense systems, the Turkish military’s infamous Bayraktar drones, and mercenaries.
Turkish intelligence selected al-Hamzat, one of eight armed groups in Turkish-controlled Syria, to recruit mercenaries for Libya. Al-Hazmat emerged in 2013 as a division within the Free Syrian Army. The group received training and equipment directly from the United States and United Kingdom, first to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime, then to fight ISIS. In 2016, under the leadership of Seif Abu Bakr, al-Hamzat joined Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield against the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkish military officers put no restrictions on the number of recruits for the Libyan front. An influx of Syrians would provide more time to train Libyan fighters and free up GNA personnel for offensive operations. Syrian commanders quickly took advantage. The more men commanders sent to Libya, the more money they could skim off the top.
One recruit, “Ahmed,” had previously fought with al-Hamzat. In Syria, Ahmed recalled, fighters were rarely forced into battle. If conditions in a skirmish became unfavorable, many would simply fall back and fight later. In Libya, however, Ahmed discovered this was not the case. Seeing the front line in south Tripoli, the barrage of artillery and the drones hovering overhead, he asked to go home. His commanding officer told him: “Coming to Libya was your choice, going back is not.”
Together with fellow recruits, Ahmed reluctantly moved into an empty villa close to the front line. The first disbursement of his salary would be in three months, upon his return to Syria. Food became an issue, and it didn’t take long for Ahmed to understand how things worked. “A shopkeeper introduced us to the black market,” he said, “where we could sell our bullets and weapons to pay for groceries.”
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