When Erik Prince signed on with Kinshasa last year, the brief was mostly about spreadsheets: help Congo's finance ministry actually collect taxes on its minerals. But on September 17, it turned into a firefight.
According to a Reuters exclusive published Friday, a team working for Prince's Vectus Global was ambushed in South Kivu in eastern Congo, leaving roughly 20 people killed and wounded, among them at least seven Congolese and a former New Zealand special forces soldier. The wounded include Tim Kennedy, the retired Green Beret, ex-UFC fighter and podcaster with millions of social media followers (and a fight résumé in a sport the president is rather fond of, as Reuters helpfully notes), who took three gunshot wounds to the leg and is recovering at Walter Reed.
Regular readers know we have been tracking Prince's slow migration from Kinshasa's tax office to the front lines since his men and drones showed up in Uvira in February. What is new is the body count, and the fact that the war for Congo's minerals now has an American celebrity casualty - which means Washington can no longer pretend it isn't there.
"An Incredibly Dangerous Place Right Now"
Per Reuters, which said it spoke to at least 10 people with direct knowledge of the attack or briefed on it, the Vectus team was moving between locations when it
