The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is known as a center for mercenary engagement and now wants to form something like its own Foreign Legion. The move could change the way secret private armies operate.
Advertisement for members of “Foreign Legion”
One job ad attracted a lot of attention. Probably because it sounded like the beginning of an action movie. In ad, it was mentioned they were looking for “foreign legionnaires”.
The candidates, to whom the advertisement refers, should be younger than 50 years old, highly disciplined and in good physical shape. Additional prerequisites: at least five years of military experience and the ability to deal with “tremendous stress.” As for the salary, the initial amount is about 2,000 dollars (about 1,840 euros), but it increases if the place of performing military tasks is outside the UAE, that is, in Yemen or Somalia. This ad was first reported by the French magazine “Intelligence Online”, which wrote that former French special forces from elite units were responsible for it, writes Deutsche Welle.
Further research led the journalists to Manar Military Company (MMC), a security consulting firm based in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi. The firm is run by a former French special forces commander and has financial ties to a wealthy, politically influential Emirati family.
The ad is the clearest indication yet that the Emirates are working to establish their own elite force of 3,000 to 4,000 recruits – expected to be formed by mid-2025. However, the media that contacted the MMC did not receive a clear answer. Company officials called the ad false, pointing out that the project had been canceled and that it was a misinformation campaign. MMC did not respond to DW’s inquiries.
Experts believe that such a project, the establishment of the foreign legion of the UAE, is very realistic. “Intelligence Online” has good connections with the French military sector. The fact that the ad went public suggests that France wants to express its protest against such developments, said military expert Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. The French are concerned that personnel from their security sector could be drawn to well-paying jobs in the UAE, Krieg adds.
At a time when the world is becoming more and more multipolar, and foreign policy is less and less ideologically guided and more and more follows specific interests, private actors are becoming more interesting, according to Sean McFate. The result is that conflicts are increasingly commercialized. The UAE, with its authoritarian leadership, great wealth and few legal restrictions, exploits this for its own purposes, he explains.
“In the last 20 years, we have experienced the commercialization of wars,” confirms Andreas Krieg. “Private and public institutions cooperate more and more in the war, so it is difficult to distinguish whether it is a state or a private matter. The Emirates are masters of this practice,” adds Krieg and concludes: “They have been using that gray area for years.”, N1 writes.
