Abstract
In November 2013, at an oilfield near Basra, Iraq, a British security contractor working for G4S was attacked by a mob of angry Iraqis, and severely beaten. The Iraqis, some from a neighbouring village and some who worked for Garda-world, another security company, were angry with the contractor for removing a flag honouring a religious figure whose holiday was being celebrated nationally. The event was captured on YouTube, and showed Iraqis with pick axes and iron bars beating the contractor after he had emerged from a stalled vehicle. In the video, some Gardaworld employees are seen intervening to slow down the mob; eventually an Iraqi police officer arrives, and the video stops (Mohammed, 2013). The British contractor ended up in hospital and eventually left the country. Baker Hughes and Schlumberger, two oil industry servicing companies whose security was provided by G4S and Gardaworld, evacuated employees, shut down their operations, and declared force majeure to signal an unavoidable non-performance of contract (Hepburn, 2013). A week later, the crisis had calmed, and all went back to work. Throughout the rest of southern Iraq, flags honouring the Imam flew from the antennae of the security companies’ vehicles. Nearly ten years after the gruesome deaths of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah brought the phenomenon of private military and security companies (PMSCs) into the public’s view, and initiated the first of two large-scale military attacks on the city by US and coalition forces, this incident barely made the news. PMSCs have become a much less contentious feature of the international landscape.
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© 2014 Kateri Carmola
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Carmola, K. (2014). Private Military and Security Companies: Armed, Global, Regulated and Professional?. In: Gill, M. (eds) The Handbook of Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-67284-4_33
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