Former UFC fighter and Army Green Beret Tim Kennedy was shot three times in the leg when a team working for Erik Prince’s private military company was ambushed in eastern Congo last month, according to reports that surfaced this week. About 20 people were killed or wounded.
Kennedy, 47, survived and is being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and is reportedly in stable condition, the Express reported.
What happened in the Congo ambush?
The ambush happened September 17 in South Kivu province in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Kennedy was part of an operations team for Vectus Global, a private security company founded by Prince, the former Navy SEAL who founded Blackwater. Vectus has a multi-year contract with Congo’s government reported to be worth up to $400 million to protect mining revenue, fight smuggling and collect taxes, and to support the fight against Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
Among the dead were Justin Conaglen, a former New Zealand Special Air Service soldier working for Vectus, another unnamed Vectus contractor and seven Congolese, according to reports from Reuters and the New Zealand Herald cited by MMA Mania. It’s believed to be the company’s first fatality in Congo. A Vectus spokesperson declined to comment, TMZ reported. Details of what happened during the attack remain unclear.
Who is Tim Kennedy?
Kennedy fought professionally from 2001 to 2016, including in the UFC, Strikeforce and WEC, and finished with an 18-6 record. He joined the Army in 2004, completed Ranger School and joined the 7th Special Forces Group, later serving in the Texas Army National Guard before returning to Special Forces in 2017. He’s a regular military commentator on Fox News and Fox Business. Last year he admitted to misrepresenting a military award he had claimed, MMA Mania noted.
Why are American contractors fighting in Congo?
Eastern Congo holds some of the world’s richest deposits of minerals used in electronics and batteries, and fighting over them has fueled decades of war. Congo has turned to private contractors as M23 rebels have taken territory. Because Vectus is a private company, not the U.S. military, there’s little public reporting on what its people do there, or what happens when they’re attacked.
The BeezLoop Take
Kennedy survived, and that’s good news. But it took weeks for this ambush, with about 20 people killed or wounded, to become public at all. That’s the problem with private armies: when things go wrong, nobody has to tell anyone.
Americans and other Westerners are now fighting in a foreign war for a company whose founder is a close Trump ally, guarding mining money for a foreign government. Congress doesn’t vote on that, and the public mostly doesn’t hear about it. It deserves a lot more scrutiny than it’s getting.
The open question: how many other Americans are working for private forces in Congo, and who’s tracking what happens to them?
Sources: Express via AOL · MMA Mania (citing Reuters and the New Zealand Herald) · TMZ via AOL (citing the Daily Mail)
