At the start of the occupation, there were an estimated ten thousand private soldiers in Iraq, already far more than during the first Gulf War. Three years later, a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that there were forty-eight thousand private soldiers, from around the world, deployed in Iraq. Mercenaries represented the largest contingent of soldiers after the U.S. military—more than all the other members of the “Coalition of the Willing” combined. The “Baghdad boom,” as it was called in the financial press, took what was a frowned-upon, shadowy sector and fully
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