A former senior director at a British firm said that it employed mercenaries from Sierra Leanne to work in Iraq due as they were cheaper than Europeans, reports the Guardian.
The Aegis Defence Services, between 2005 and 2015 recruited from countries such as Sierra Leone, “where there’s high unemployment and a decent workforce” to reduce costs for the US presence in Iraq.
The defence company, which is chaired by conservative MP Sir Nicholas Soames, had a series of contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide guards to protect US military base sin Iraq from 2004.
A new documentary, called ‘The Child New Job’ to be broadcast in Denmark alleges that 2,500 Sierra Leonean personnel were recruited to work in Iraq, many of which were child soldiers.
Commenting on his film, the director Mads Ellesøe, said,
“When war gets outsourced, then the companies tries to find the cheapest soldiers globally. Turns out that that is former child soldiers from Sierra Leone. I think it is important that we in the west are aware of the consequences of the privatisation of war,”
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