In 2005, when Pakistani soldiers wearing the blue helmets of the United Nations deployed to Mongbwalu in eastern Congo, they arrived in a town that had already buried two thousand of its neighbors. The small mining settlement in the Ituri district had changed hands five times during brutal ethnic fighting between Hema and Lendu militias. The earth there was rich with gold, and the recent years had been soaked in blood. The peacekeepers came with a mandate to disarm the militias and protect civilians. Instead, they became part of something else entirely, a sophisticated system of resource extraction that would feed Dubai’s gold refineries for decades to come.
What happened in Mongbwalu between 2005 and 2008 wasn’t simply a peacekeeping scandal. It was the construction of a transnational mercenary network serving Gulf Arab interests, built on the corruption of international institutions, the recruitment of economically desperate nations’ soldiers, and the exploitation of regulatory gaps in global commodity markets. The Pakistani peacekeepers at the center of the scandal weren’t acting for their own country’s interests. They were caught in a web spun by the United Arab Emirates, which had learned to weaponize UN peacekeeping operations for resource extraction while building a vast mercenary army that operates across Africa and the Middle East to this day.
Inside Mongbwalu’s UN compound, Pakistani officers began holding meetings with two militia commanders known by their noms de guerre: Kung Fu and Dragon. Kung Fu’s real name was General Mateso Ninga. Both men had ordered ethnic massacres during the fighting that devastated Ituri. Both controlled access to the richest gold mines in the region. And now, as multiple witnesses would later testify, they were conducting business with UN peacekeepers in a thatched house within the camp itself. A UN translator who worked with the Pakistani peacekeepers provided a detailed account to investigators in June 2006. He described being asked to interpret a meeting in 2005 between a Pakistani officer and the two FNI commanders. Before the meeting began, the translator said, the Pakistani officer looked at him with particular intensity and delivered a warning: tell no one what you’re about to hear. During the meeting, the translator heard the officer ask Kung Fu about weapons and about “our business.” When the translator inquired what “our business” meant, he was told they were discussing gold. Everyone in Mongbwalu, he said, knew that Kung Fu and Dragon were dealing gold with the Pakistani battalion.
The operation had layers of sophistication. Pakistani peacekeepers provided security, transportation, and most critically, access to UN flights. This allowed gold to move from Mongbwalu to markets beyond Congo’s borders without passing through normal channels where it might be intercepted or taxed. Human Rights Watch estimated the network moved millions of dollars worth of gold. But the Pakistani soldiers weren’t working alone. Congolese army officers joined the scheme. So did Kenyan traders operating out of Kenya. Richard Ndilu, in charge of immigration at Mongbwalu airstrip, became suspicious in late 2005 when an Indian businessman arrived and went straight to stay at the Pakistani peacekeepers’ camp. But gold smuggling, while lucrative, was only part of the story. Multiple witnesses described something far more troubling: Pakistani peacekeepers weren’t just trading with the militias—they were rearming them.
A Congolese army officer working on disarmament in the nearby town of Nizi provided a signed statement to UN investigators. His account was specific and damning. He identified a Pakistani officer by name, Major Zanfar, and described how weapons collected from ex-combatants during disarmament operations were secretly returned to those same fighters. The pattern repeated itself over and over. Militia members would turn in their weapons one day, as required by the peace process. The next day, they’d be armed again. When the Congolese officer asked around, the answer was always the same: the Pakistani battalion was giving the weapons back. The implications were staggering. The Front for National Integration (FNI) had committed atrocities that placed them among the worst actors in eastern Congo, a region where competition for that title was fierce. They’d massacred civilians on an ethnic basis. They’d engaged in systematic sexual violence. They’d turned gold mining into organized violence. And UN peacekeepers, deployed specifically to disarm these militias and protect civilians, were allegedly providing them with the very weapons needed to continue their campaigns of terror.
When a UN investigation team arrived in Mongbwalu in August 2006, they initially received cooperation from the Pakistani battalion. Then they moved to seize a computer that allegedly contained incriminating documents. What happened next revealed how deeply the system was protected.
The Pakistani peacekeepers turned their compound into a fortress. They surrounded the UN police accompanying the investigators with barbed wire. They positioned two armored personnel carriers outside the quarters where the investigators were staying at a nearby Christian mission. The message was unmistakable: you’re not taking that computer, and you’re not safe here. The intimidated investigators were airlifted out of Mongbwalu by helicopter. They never got the computer. The investigation proceeded without whatever evidence might have been on that hard drive. For more than a year, the investigation gathered dust in some office in New York. Only when the BBC launched its own eighteen-month investigation and went public with their findings in May 2007 did things change. The BBC broadcast included a bombshell: a UN official stating there had been “a plan to bury” the investigation into the Pakistani peacekeepers. Only after this public embarrassment did the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services finally complete its inquiry. The July 2007 OIOS report was a masterclass in institutional whitewashing. It concluded that a single Pakistani officer had failed to prevent peacekeepers under his authority from providing support and security to persons involved in illegal gold trafficking. That was it. One officer. Failure to prevent. Not active participation, not organization of a smuggling ring, not weapons trafficking. Just failure to prevent gold trafficking by others.
On the weapons allegations, the accounts from the Congolese officer, the UN translator’s testimony, the pattern of disarmament followed by rearmament, OIOS found no evidence. They couldn’t substantiate the claims, the report said, due to an absence of corroborative evidence.
Then something extraordinary happened. On May 25, 2007, just before the OIOS report was finalized, the FNI commanders themselves issued a public statement. In it, they confirmed they had received weapons and ammunition from Pakistani peacekeepers in 2005. They confirmed they had traded gold with them. When the BBC interviewed General Ninga later, he was explicit: “Yes, it’s true, they did give us arms. They said it was for the security of the country.” One would think this confession from the alleged recipients of the weapons would prompt OIOS to reopen its inquiry. As far as can be determined from public records, they never did. Human Rights Watch tried to arrange a meeting with Inga-Britt Ahlenius, the Under-Secretary-General responsible for OIOS, in September 2007. They wanted to discuss concerns about the investigation’s narrowness and the lack of accountability. The request was refused. The meeting was deemed unnecessary.
Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, told the BBC on July 13, 2007, that the matter was “now closed.” This was his position despite the fact that no individual had been held accountable, despite the confession from the militia commanders, despite multiple witness statements describing a pattern of illegal activity far broader than a single officer’s failure to prevent others from misbehaving. The reason for the cover-up wasn’t complicated. Pakistan provided 10,000 troops to UN peacekeeping missions around the world. These troops were crucial to the UN’s ability to maintain operations in multiple countries simultaneously. Alienating Pakistan by aggressively investigating and prosecuting its peacekeepers risked losing those 10,000 soldiers. BBC sources described as “UN insiders” said investigators had been prevented from pursuing their inquiries for political reasons. The UN faced a choice: pursue justice in one case, or maintain the capacity to deploy peacekeepers globally. The institution chose capacity over justice.
Not one Pakistani peacekeeper was prosecuted. Not one faced criminal charges in Pakistani courts. Pakistani military authorities issued blanket denials, characterized the allegations as “ill founded evidence” and “unfounded propaganda,” and suggested the real problem was investigators with bad attitudes. The UN accepted this response, and the matter was officially closed.
But the official investigation never answered the most important question: who were the Pakistani peacekeepers really working for? The gold from Mongbwalu had a specific destination, and understanding that destination reveals the true nature of what was happening in eastern Congo. Between 2012 and 2022, the United Arab Emirates received over 2,500 tonnes of smuggled gold from Africa, with an estimated value of $115 billion, according to a report by the Swiss NGO SwissAid. But the infrastructure for this trade wasn’t built in 2012. It was established years earlier, in places like Mongbwalu, where soldiers wearing blue helmets facilitated the networks that would feed Dubai’s refineries for decades.
Nearly all conflict gold from the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic ends up in Dubai first, according to The Sentry, a policy organization tracking illicit financial flows. Once there, it’s refined and stamped with Gulf seals. What arrives as conflict gold leaves as “clean” Emirati product, its origins erased, ready to enter global markets legitimately. The smuggling route from Mongbwalu was sophisticated and well-established. Pakistani peacekeepers provided security and access to UN transportation. The gold moved to Uganda and Kenya, where it was documented as local production despite neither country having significant gold mining operations. Uganda’s gold exports skyrocketed during this period, quickly outpacing anything the country actually produced. From these regional hubs, the gold flowed to Dubai. The same UAE that became the final destination for Congo’s gold employed tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers as contract military forces. This wasn’t coincidental. Pakistan provided manpower to Gulf armies—not as volunteers representing their nation, but as paid mercenaries. The connection between Pakistani peacekeepers facilitating gold smuggling in Congo and Pakistani soldiers serving as contract forces for the UAE reveals something crucial: the Pakistani troops in Mongbwalu weren’t acting for Islamabad’s interests. They were caught in a web spun by Gulf states who had learned to weaponize UN peacekeeping for resource extraction.
What the UAE was building in the mid-2000s went far beyond a single gold smuggling operation in Congo. The Gulf state was constructing a mercenary economy that spanned East Africa and the Middle East, using UN peacekeeping missions as training grounds and recruitment pools. The model worked like this: Soldiers from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and other economically struggling nations would serve in UN missions. There, they’d gain combat experience, build networks with local militias and traders, learn how resource extraction worked in conflict zones, and establish connections that would prove valuable later. Then they’d rotate into private military contracts serving Gulf states. The blue helmets were both training and cover.
By the late 2000s, Gulf states employed massive numbers of foreign contract soldiers. The UAE’s armed forces in particular came to rely heavily on Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos, and Sudanese troops. These weren’t traditional militaries composed of citizens defending their homeland. They were mercenary armies that could be deployed without domestic political consequences. Many of these soldiers gained their experience and built their networks in UN peacekeeping missions like MONUC in Congo.
According to research by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Qatar’s armed forces were staffed overwhelmingly—up to 85 percent—with contract soldiers, many from Pakistan and Sudan. Saudi Arabia’s ground forces in Yemen were said to be made up almost entirely of contract soldiers. The UAE employed Colombian, Panamanian, Chilean, and Salvadoran mercenaries alongside African troops in its military operations. Pakistan’s contribution was substantial: tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers served in Gulf state militaries as contract forces, earning revenue that helped sustain Pakistan’s struggling economy.
The financial dependency was deliberate and provided leverage. Gulf states offered remittances, oil contracts, and military payments worth billions of dollars. When the UAE needed soldiers for its gold operations in Congo, Pakistan provided them under UN cover. When Gulf states needed mercenaries for Yemen, Pakistan sent thousands more. The leverage was always financial. The price was becoming an instrument of someone else’s empire. Pakistani intelligence services had deep connections to Dubai’s criminal networks going back decades. The infamous D-Company, based in Dubai, worked closely with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency on gold smuggling, arms trafficking, and drug trade. ISI officers joined hands with criminal syndicates in gold smuggling operations that enriched both the organization and connected Pakistani officials. The infrastructure for the Mongbwalu operation, the contacts, the routes, the methods—was already in place when the peacekeepers arrived.
Between 2005 and 2012, Pakistan funded 63% of new mosques in eastern DRC’s Medina region, according to research published in the Journal of International Organizations Studies. This wasn’t charity. It was infrastructure for long-term presence in resource-rich areas. The UAE was building a system with multiple layers: ideological influence through religious institutions, military presence under UN cover, commercial networks for resource extraction, and mercenary forces that could operate across Africa and the Middle East with plausible deniability.
What happened with Pakistani peacekeepers in Mongbwalu wasn’t an isolated case of corruption. It was part of a broader pattern across UN operations in Congo during the same period.
In February 2008, a preliminary OIOS assessment listed 44 allegations of misconduct and illegal behavior by Indian peacekeeping troops in North Kivu, covering the period from late 2005 to October 2007. OIOS found evidence supporting at least ten of these allegations. The list of accusations was damning: weapons trading with the FDLR, a militia group whose leaders had participated in the Rwandan genocide; informing armed groups of planned UN military operations; smuggling natural resources including gold and ivory; unlawful detention of Congolese citizens; and misuse of MONUC equipment and resources.
Bangladeshi peacekeepers faced allegations of killing two Congolese detainees and beating others in Ituri in February 2005. An investigation eventually found that the peacekeepers had used excessive force against detainees trying to escape, but prosecutions didn’t follow. Throughout MONUC’s operation in Congo, allegations of sexual exploitation of local women and girls emerged repeatedly. A confidential UN report obtained by The Washington Post revealed that UN peacekeepers had threatened investigators looking into sexual misconduct allegations. The report documented instances where peacekeepers from Morocco, Pakistan, and possibly Tunisia had attempted to bribe witnesses to change their testimony.
All of it fed the same network. Gold and other resources moved through the same channels. The regional hubs, Uganda and Kenya, processed smuggled goods from multiple sources. And the ultimate destination remained consistent: Dubai’s refineries and markets, where conflict minerals were laundered and legitimized before entering global supply chains.
Kenya operated as more than just a transit point for smuggled gold. Nairobi became a crucial hub in the UAE’s mercenary and resource extraction network—a place where traders operated, where smuggling routes converged, and eventually, where people who threatened to expose the system would be silenced.
In October 2022, seventeen years after the Mongbwalu scandal, Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif was shot dead at a roadblock outside Nairobi. Kenyan police called it mistaken identity they claimed they were looking for a similar car involved in a child abduction case. But a Pakistani fact-finding team that traveled to Kenya concluded something different: Sharif’s death was a “planned, targeted assassination by transnational actors.” Sharif had fled Pakistan in August 2022 to avoid arrest on charges of maligning Pakistan’s national institutions. More accurately, he’d fled because of threats to his life. He was a prominent investigative journalist who had become increasingly critical of Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. His reporting had touched on precisely the kinds of networks that connected Pakistani military and intelligence services to Gulf state interests the mercenary economy, the resource extraction schemes, the corruption that turned soldiers into instruments of foreign powers. He died in Kenya, the same country that had served as a hub for the gold and weapons networks his military had helped run in Congo years earlier. In July 2024, a Kenyan court ruled that his killing was “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional.” The court ordered Kenyan authorities to continue their investigation and prosecute the police officers who shot Sharif. As of this writing, no one has been prosecuted. The hub protects itself.
More than a tonne of gold leaves eastern Congo every day. Over the course of a year, that amounts to more than $30 billion worth of the precious metal, according to current estimates. It moves through the same networks established in the mid-2000s. Regional hubs in Uganda and Kenya serve as transit and laundering points. Peacekeepers and private military contractors facilitate the movement. Dubai refineries process it, stamp it, and send it into global markets as legitimate product.
The UAE today receives 93% of undeclared African gold exports, according to SwissAid’s research. The infrastructure built during the Mongbwalu years—when Pakistani peacekeepers in blue helmets established connections between militia-controlled mines and Gulf refineries, now operates at industrial scale. What began as millions in smuggled gold has become a multi-billion dollar system that funds armed groups, corrupts governments, and perpetuates violence across multiple African nations. The UAE has refined and expanded the model it tested in Congo. In Sudan, where civil war has created chaos, UAE-backed militias control gold mining areas. The gold flows through Chad and Egypt to Dubai. In the Central African Republic, in Mali, across the Sahel, the pattern repeats: conflict creates opportunity, local forces control the resources, regional networks move the goods, and Dubai provides the market that transforms conflict minerals into legitimate products.
The mercenary forces the UAE employs have also expanded. Today, private military contractors operate across Africa and the Middle East on behalf of Gulf interests. They fight in Yemen, Libya, and Sudan. They protect mining operations and oil facilities. They train local forces and conduct operations that official armies cannot or will not. Many of these contractors gained their initial experience in UN peacekeeping missions, learning their trade while wearing blue helmets and drawing international salaries.
The scandal in Mongbwalu exposed a fundamental flaw in how international peacekeeping operates. The United Nations has no standing military force. It depends entirely on voluntary contributions of troops from member states. Those troops remain under the legal jurisdiction of their home countries. When misconduct occurs, the UN can investigate, but it cannot prosecute. It can only refer cases back to the troop-contributing country and hope they’ll take action.
This creates a built-in conflict of interest. Countries contribute troops to gain international prestige, fulfill foreign policy objectives, and earn revenue, the UN pays troop-contributing countries for each soldier deployed. But prosecuting peacekeepers for crimes committed during UN service risks domestic political backlash and might discourage future participation. For countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, the revenue from contributing troops to UN missions represents significant income. They have every incentive to protect their personnel from accountability. The result is a system where serious allegations are investigated minimally, findings are narrowed to implicate as few individuals as possible, and even those findings rarely lead to prosecution. When Pakistani peacekeepers were caught red-handed facilitating gold smuggling and weapons trafficking, with confessions from the militia commanders themselves, the response was to blame one officer for “failing to prevent” others from misbehaving, close the case, and declare the matter resolved. The UN’s dependence on major troop contributors like Pakistan creates a hostage situation. Investigate too aggressively, prosecute too enthusiastically, and you risk losing the troops you need to maintain operations elsewhere. The institution faces a choice between justice and capacity. Time and again, it chooses capacity. The peacekeepers rotate out, their experience and connections intact, ready for their next assignment or their next contract with a private military firm.
What the UAE accomplished in Mongbwalu and across eastern Congo in the mid-2000s represents a new model of imperialism. The Gulf state learned something crucial: you don’t need to invade countries to control their resources. You don’t need colonies or occupying armies. You need mercenary forces operating under international cover, regional hubs to launder the goods, and weak oversight of global commodity markets.
The Pakistani peacekeepers in Mongbwalu were never there to keep peace. They were there to establish the networks that would feed Dubai’s gold markets for decades. They built relationships with militia leaders who controlled the mines. They connected those leaders to traders who could move the gold to regional hubs. They provided the security and transportation that made the whole system work. And they did it all while wearing UN blue helmets and drawing international salaries, protected by institutional reluctance to hold major troop contributors accountable. Pakistan supplied the manpower for this operation, caught between financial dependence on Gulf states and complicity in their resource extraction schemes. The leverage Gulf states held over Pakistan was economic. The country needed the remittances from soldiers serving in Gulf militaries. It needed the oil contracts and the financial aid. When the UAE needed soldiers for its gold operations in Congo, Pakistan couldn’t afford to refuse. When Gulf states needed mercenaries for Yemen, Pakistan sent thousands more.
The system thrives today because it serves everyone’s interests except those of the people it claims to protect. The UAE gets its gold and its mercenary forces. Pakistan gets revenue and employment for excess military personnel. The UN maintains its peacekeeping capacity. Regional hubs like Kenya and Uganda benefit from the trade flowing through their territories. The only losers are the Congolese civilians whose resources are stolen, whose communities are devastated by militias that UN peacekeepers secretly arm, and whose trust in international institutions is shattered when they discover the blue helmets came not to protect them but to facilitate their exploitation.
The blue helmets arrived in Mongbwalu in 2005 with a mandate to protect civilians and build peace. They left having armed mass murderers and established smuggling networks worth billions. That betrayal stands as a monument to what happens when international institutions prioritize their own survival over justice, when economic desperation turns soldiers into mercenaries, and when the powerful discover they can extract wealth from conflict zones while the international community looks the other way. The system built in that dusty mining town in eastern Congo operates today on a scale its architects likely never imagined, protected by the same forces that shielded it from accountability two decades ago.