Introduction

It is June 2019. A crew of 20 Australian, British, American, and South African private military and security contractors find themselves on a small boat heading for Malta with a 40-hour journey across the Mediterranean ahead of them. Two months earlier, Libyan warlord Khalifa Hafter had procured the services of a group of private security and logistics contractors based in the UAE. Haftar had been waging a ruthless war against the Libyan Government since 2014, his forces suspected of serious human rights violations.