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In the season two opener of the Guns for Hire podcast, Alia chats with Emmy award-winning BBC investigative journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi about her film exposing American mercenaries in Yemen.

One of the few journalists to report from Yemen first-hand, Nawal discusses the Delaware-registered PMC contracted by the UAE to kill “terrorists”, her meetings with two of the Americans involved, and the PMC’s training of Yemeni units – including former al-Qaeda operatives – to conduct targeted assassinations.

“He knows these guys aren’t terrorists. This was a business deal. He knew what he was doing but he will never say it.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In Episode 10 of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi is joined by Renad Mansour, an expert on Iraq, Iran and allied groups. As the region convulses from the war in Gaza, they begin by assessing reports that the Wagner Group has been tasked with transferring a Russian air defence system from Syria to Hizballah in Lebanon.

They go on to discuss the rivalry between Russia and Iran in the Middle East, what is motivating the non-state actors leading the bid to avenge Gazans, and whether elements of the Iran-backed Shi’a militia that have fanned out across the region can be classed as mercenaries. Alia and Renad also consider parallels between the campaign in Gaza and the violence and futility of the 2003 Iraq war.

“There will be within these networks and this massive web of [Shi’a] armed groups those that are economically inclined, those that do see economic opportunity in trade or in taking advantage of conflict”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In episode nine of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi speaks with the Russia analyst Sergey Sukhankin about the 2019 arrest in Libya of the Wagner Group political operative Maksim Shugaley and the Russian propaganda campaign to free him. They discuss Russian political and media operations in Africa, from Libya to Madagascar, and how Russia fundamentally lacks the ideological and financial enticements of the Soviet Union or of China.

“This goes back to Soviet times when the Soviet Union was inviting people like [George] Bernard Shaw and many other public figures… Today Russia is using virtually the same playbook.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Lawfare is the use of legal systems for strategic advantage. One of its pioneers, the international human rights lawyer Jason McCue, joins host Alia Brahimi on episode eight of the Guns for Hire podcast. Jason describes how he first began pursuing the IRA through private civil actions in the 1990s and goes on to outline the application of these methods to the Wagner Group. Jason and Alia also discuss whether it’s meaningful to designate mercenary groups as terrorists, if private civil actions can form the basis for criminal prosecutions, and how Jason and his law partner were personally sanctioned by the Russian state.

“Autocrats are looking for a model for asymmetric warfare against democrats and the Wagner model is definitely the model on the table, with its plausible deniability. And it’s really important for us to not only designate it but to litigate it.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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As humans share more of their experiences online for the world to see, the blank zones are shrinking. In episode seven of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi is joined by Eliot Higgins, an award-winning journalist and founder of the independent investigative collective, Bellingcat. Eliot, who was personally sued by the late mercenary leader Yevgeny Prighozin for outing him as the oligarch behind the Wagner Group, discusses the types of online open-source tools used to track mercenary activity, and how anyone with a bit of time and an internet connection can get involved.

“A mercenary might have a friend who uses social media a lot and they’re featuring a lot in these photographs, for example, and then you can start building out the networks from that.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Host Alia Brahimi is joined by the Libyan security expert and Atlantic Council Nonresident Senior Fellow Emadeddin Badi. They discuss the surge of African, Syrian and Russian mercenaries in Libya since 2019, the major value-add of Wagner Group contractors in terms of utilising Libya's Soviet-era weapons and mortar and sniping capabilities, and how mercenary recruitment networks are used to smuggle migrants to Europe. The working assumption of the international community is that a future elected government will expel mercenaries from Libya, but Emadeddin argues that the mercenaries themselves pose a threat to the freeness and fairness of those very elections.

“You have smugglers that are actually putting Syrians on [mercenary] rotations to Libya in order for those Syrians to then depart for Europe. So there’s a whole new political economy around migrant smuggling.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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In this bumper episode on the war in Sudan, host Alia Brahimi speaks with the former US government expert on Sudan, Cameron Hudson, about the mercenary pedigree of the Rapid Support Forces and its transformation from a ragtag Arab militia into an institutional juggernaut.

Cameron argues that this mercenary history has had a determinative impact on the conflict: it has generated a cash windfall which allows the RSF to recruit in numbers to rival the size of the national army; it has forged regional relationships that are now central to the RSF’s resupply; and it feeds a detached mercenary mentality amongst RSF fighters that facilitates war crimes and abuses. As mercenaries from multiple Sahelian states flood into Sudan, Cameron also contends that the conflict in Sudan is becoming a pan-African conflict in ways that are not yet understood.

They discuss, too, the role of the Wagner Group in the war in Sudan and the status of Libya as a major source of resupply for the RSF.

Alia also chats with Professor Munzoul Assal of the University of Khartoum about the danger of two parallel governments emerging in Sudan along the lines of the bifurcation in Libya. Munzoul also discusses, the presence of RSF fighters at the Sudanese border with the Central African Republic where the Wagner Group is deeply entrenched, as well as the clear and alarming possibilities for a regional conflagration.

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.

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Host Alia Brahimi speaks with renowned Russia expert Mark Galeotti about the striking developments which saw mutinous mercenary forces from the Wagner Group take over two Russian cities and march towards Moscow. Mark argues that the plot was not picked up in a timely manner precisely because the Wagner Group is a mercenary force operating outside of the purview of counterintelligence and the units that ordinarily monitor the loyalty of the military.

“It’s likely that this is the start of the real endgame… most crucially of all it was the spectacle of the security forces in the main not joining Wagner, but nor did they act to stop Wagner. They sat back and just thought, let’s see how this all plays out.”

The Guns for Hire podcast is written, produced and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.