On September 16, 2007, private security guards working for the firm Blackwater Worldwide were escorting diplomats with the US State Department through Baghdad’s Nusoor Square when they got into a firefight that left 14 Iraqis dead and 17 others injured. The shooting was a watershed moment in the American occupation of Iraq, and was a factor in Iraq’s refusal the next year to agree to a treaty allowing US troops to stay in the country beyond 2011.
What is Blackwater?
Blackwater was founded by ex-Navy Seal Erik Prince in 1997 as a shooting range and military training ground in Moyock, North Carolina. It was funded with millions that Prince inherited from the sale of his late father’s auto-parts business.
The 6,000-acre facility quickly grew into a place for current and former military, FBI, CIA and local law enforcement operatives looking to hone their skills and socialise.
Then 9/11 happened. The CIA began hiring more private firms to provide protection in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and Blackwater’s real money-making operation took off. Multi-million-dollar contracts started rolling in from the government. That included a $27.7 million (Dh92 million) contract in late 2003 to provide ongoing security for US officials in Iraq looking for “weapons of mass destruction.”
After years of controversy, Prince sold the company in 2010 and moved to Abu Dhabi.
Regarding the 2007 shooting, Prince has previously said, “I believe we acted appropriately at all times.”
The firm eventually changed its name to Xe in 2009 and then the facilities were sold to a private group of investors, which formed a brand new company called Academi in 2010.
What happened that day in Baghdad?
On September 16, 2007, a Blackwater security team — code named Raven 23 — was assigned to clear the way for a convoy of diplomats travelling through western Baghdad to a meeting with officials from the US Agency for International Development.
When a car bomb exploded in downtown Baghdad along the route, the 19-member Blackwater team decided to set up a blockade at nearby Nusoor Square.
Government prosecutors say six members of the team fired shots that left 14 Iraqi civilians dead and 17 more injured.
The scene of the crime
Mohammad Abdul Razzaq was driving into Nusoor Square with his sister, her three children and his nine-year-old son Ali at the same time the Blackwater team arrived.
“They gestured stop, so we all stopped,” Razzaq said. “It’s a secure area so we thought it will be the usual, we would stop for a bit as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at the cars with no exception.”
“My son was sitting behind me,” he said. “He was shot in the head and his brains were all over the back of the car.”
The others ducked and were spared, he said.
He later counted 36 bullet holes in his car, six in his sister’s headrest.
“Anyone who got out of his car would be killed,” he said. “Anyone who would move was killed. Anyone sitting in a car was killed.”
“I saw a guy in a small car who got out to flee, they shot him and he hit the ground,” Razzaq said. “They fired at him again and again with his blood flowing in the street, but they continued to shoot him.”
“It was hell, like a scene from a movie,” he said
Why did the trial take so long?
After it became clear that the massacre at Nusoor Square wasn’t as clear-cut as good guys-versus-bad guys, many Iraqi and even US officials condemned the event, and the FBI was almost immediately tasked with investigating the incident that October.
The probe plugged away, including interviews with dozens of foreign nationals and Americans, but In 2009, US District Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed the case. He said government lawyers ignored the advice of senior Justice Department officials by building the criminal case on sworn statements of the guards given under a grant of immunity — meaning the guards’ own statements could not be used against them.
Then, in 2011, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived the prosecution, ruling that Urbina had wrongly interpreted the law and that the case could proceed.
The accused
In September, prosecutors agreed to dismiss their case against a fifth guard, Donald Ball, a retired Marine from West Valley City, Utah.
On Monday, US District Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced former guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison and three others to 30-year terms for their roles in the shootings.
Slatten, who witnesses said was the first to fire shots in the melee, was sentenced to life after being convicted last October of first-degree murder. The three other guards — Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard — were each sentenced to 30 years and one day in prison for charges that included manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and using firearms while committing a felony.
A sixth guard, Jeremy Ridgeway of California, who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, is expected to testify for the prosecution and is awaiting sentencing.
Why were they tried in the US?
In June 2004, L. Paul Bremer — who had been set up by the George W. Bush administration as the governor of Iraq after the US-led occupation — issued Order 17. That rule established, among other things, that “contractors shall not be subject to Iraqi laws or regulations in matters relating to the terms and conditions of their contracts.”
Why the Blackwater trial was important
This episode damaged America’s reputation in the region and has been repeatedly held up by critics of the George W. Bush administration as an example of why it can be problematic to task private companies with military assignments — although the idea is nothing new.
“This is really a post-Cold War phenomenon. With the draw-down of the US military, that’s when we really started to privatise the military in earnest,” said Joe Young, a professor of justice, law and criminology at American University in Washington, D.C., and an expert on international extremism who has worked with the Defence Department.
“You have all these American, South African, British and Australian special forces who were looking for employment — you start to see groups like DynCorp [a similar firm], Blackwater and other private military who are going all over the world,” said Young.
He noted that beyond the murky legal status of private military operations, they can actually lower the morale of enlisted soldiers, who are often performing the same services for far less pay than the contractors.
And Young added, “One interesting thing — I’ve been to several Blackwater services demonstrations — one of the things they’ll remind you of: There have been mercenaries involved in wars for thousands of years.”
And what about Prince now?
Prince’s career is still humming, though. He sold Blackwater in 2010, reportedly for about $200 million. Prince has steered clear since the sale, visiting its Moyock, North Carolina, compound only once in January 2014 for a visit to a gun range while on a hunting trip on property he had kept, he said.
“I’ve never met the management team there, I don’t talk to anyone there,” he said.
Instead, Prince became the chairman of another security firm, Frontier Services Group. It focuses heavily on providing logistics and aviation support to companies in Africa, he said. The firm was incorporated in Bermuda and is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with numerous Chinese investors.
In the last year, Frontier has sunk money into two aviation firms with headquarters in Kenya, Kijipwa Aviation Limited and Phoenix, according to the company’s last earnings report. The deal for Phoenix, announced in July, cost $14 million and puts Frontier in charge of a company that flies regularly out of not only Kenya, but Angola, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia.
— Compiled from agencies
