Blackwater Bloodied: Erik Prince’s Congo Force Ambushed, Ex-UFC Star Tim Kennedy Shot In The Fight For The World’s Cobalt

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 was hit. Some highlights:

• Two sources working with Congo’s government put the toll at about 20 dead and wounded; a Congolese security source added that villagers were likely among the casualties too.
• The dead included a former member of New Zealand’s Special Forces, whom the NZ Herald has identified as NZSAS veteran Justin Conaglen, since buried in Northland. Kennedy and one other foreign contractor were among the wounded.
• It is the first time the company has taken casualties in Congo, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operation. Vectus declined to comment.
• The kicker: one government-side source suspects Rwandan forces backing M23 found the team by tracking one of its own surveillance drones. Two other sources flatly said the Rwandan military carried out the ambush; a third said the attack’s sophistication pointed that way.

Kigali, Kinshasa and M23 did not respond to Reuters, and Rwanda has always denied backing M23 despite UN and Western claims that it exercises command and control over the group. Its online supporters, meanwhile, were already busy Friday recasting the ambush as one of Congo’s “internal wars.” Denial at its finest.

As for the irony: the drone that allegedly gave away the team’s position was exactly the kind of kit Prince had been flying with lethal results in Haiti last year.

From Tax Collector To Front Line In Under 18 Months

The original pitch was decidedly un-Blackwater. When Reuters first reported the deal in April 2025, the mandate was to tighten tax collection and curb mineral smuggling in copper-rich Katanga, far from the M23 front, with one Congolese source claiming about $40 million a month in lost revenue in the Kolwezi area alone. Sources at the time stressed there were no plans to send security contractors into active conflict zones (it’s call black ops for a reason).

That lasted about nine months.

In January and early February, after M23 briefly seized Uvira on the Burundi border and Washington leaned on the rebels to pull back, Prince’s men and drones deployed to help Congo’s army lock the town down, alongside Israeli trainers. We covered it at the time:

Erik Prince, Israeli Advisers Operated With Congolese Special Forces https://t.co/XiFBy5SqAR

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 12, 2026

Now Vectus is taking fire in South Kivu. Officially, of course, none of this is America’s war: the State Department says it has no contracts with Prince in Congo, even as US officials have said they plan to work more closely with Vectus in Haiti. In other words, a Trump ally’s private army is guarding the minerals America just signed a deal for, under a peace accord America brokered, without an American contract. Plausible deniability has rarely been this thin.

Follow The Cobalt

Why would anyone send a former Green Beret to the jungles of South Kivu? Because Congo is not just “rich in minerals.” It is the cobalt market: according to the USGS, the DRC mined some 230,000 tons of the world’s ~310,000 tons in 2025, or 74%. Indonesia, a distant second, managed 14%. The US? 0.1%.

And Kinshasa has learned how to use that leverage. Congo suspended cobalt exports outright in February 2025 when prices hit nine-year lows, then replaced the ban with quotas in October that will run through at least end-2027. The result: cobalt metal hit $26/lb this spring, up 160% since the ban. Nothing says “strategic mineral” like a single country being able to more than double the price by closing the border.

Washington noticed. The Pentagon went shopping for its biggest cobalt stockpile since 1990 in August 2025:

US MILITARY PLANS TO STOCKPILE COBALT FOR FIRST TIME IN DECADES

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 21, 2025

…then (in typical fashion) cancelled the purchase two months later. In December, Trump hosted Kagame and Tshisekedi to sign the “Washington Accords,” pledging that the US would buy their minerals and inking bilateral deals for access. And in April, a tiny eight-person US firm founded by an ex-Green Beret (a recurring theme) took control of Chemaf, one of the biggest non-Chinese cobalt producers, after a $920 million sale to a Chinese state-owned defense group collapsed. As we reported back in July 2025, “the US is catching up” in the race with China for DR Congo’s minerals.

It isn’t just cobalt, either. Congo is also the swing source of new copper supply at a time when the red metal trades near $14,500/ton. In his October 7 morning note (available to pro subs), Goldman’s metals specialist James McGeoch laid out the bank’s published mine supply numbers: global output down 1% this year, then up 2.6% in 2027, which he calls the biggest ask for Q3 prints. And a big chunk of that growth is supposed to come from Congo:

The current published numbers at GS are mine supply -1% y/y for 2026, for 2027 we are +2.6% (the delta is mostly new growth, Chile +2% y/y, DRC +6% includes +90kt at KK v cons 100kt, Indonesia basis Grasberg at +140kt v cons +180kt, Panama the team have +190kt v cons 150kt).

Translation: with Chile’s production down 8% YTD, Congo is one of the few places the Street is counting on for more copper next year. To be fair to Goldman, Kamoa-Kakula sits in Lualaba, hundreds of miles south of South Kivu. But every ambush in the east is a reminder that “DRC +6%” is a forecast that comes with a security bill attached – and someone has to pay it. Right now, that someone is apparently Erik Prince’s contractors.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before (Different Sponsor)

None of this should surprise long-time readers. Back in January 2019, we reported that Prince was launching a fund of up to $500 million for electric-car metals, having already found a copper-cobalt deposit in Congo, explaining to the FT that battery minerals come “from generally weird, hard-to-access places.” At the time, Congo supplied “more than 60%” of the world’s cobalt. It’s now three-quarters.

The twist? Back then Prince’s Frontier Services Group was backed by China’s state-owned Citic, which is why five years earlier we had asked how Erik Prince would help China subjugate Africa. A decade later, he is the tip of the (private) American spear trying to pry Congo’s minerals away from Beijing. Mercenary, it turns out, is truly a flexible job description.

Bottom Line

On paper, the eastern Congo war ended in Washington last December. On the ground, M23 still controls swathes of the east, Kigali and Kinshasa keep trading accusations at the oversight committee, Congo is fighting an Ebola outbreak that has now reached Kenya, and the private contractors America relies on, but doesn’t officially employ, are taking bullets. Or, as one of Reuters’ sources summed it up, eastern Congo is “an incredibly dangerous place right now.”

The question is what happens next. One path: the casualties (and Kennedy’s megaphone) push the administration to lean harder on Kigali to enforce the accords. The other, and far more likely, path: the minerals are simply too important to walk away from, so the privatized security footprint grows, the drones get bigger, and “no plans to deploy to active conflict areas” becomes the second-funniest line in this entire saga – behind the State Department’s “no contracts.”

Either way, the price of three-quarters of the world’s cobalt just went up. It’s now measured in more than dollars per pound.

Much more in the full GS Materials morning note, available to pro subs.