Description
Iraq Reconstruction Service Medal, EIIR, Laser Engraved naming, You R. Ranamagar. In Royal Mint case of issue and card outer carton.
Laser Engraved Naming: “YOU R RANAMAGAR”
Medal is still on the original ribbon and brooch fitting inside the Royal Mint box of issue and with outside cardboard carton.
This scarce medal was established on 26th June 2004 and was only issued between 2007 until it was discontinued on 1st October 2013, by which time only about 3800 medals had been issued.
In order to earn the medal you had to serve in Iraq between 19th March 2003 and 1st October 2013.
Locally employed civilians were not able to earn the medal but Foreign or Commonwealth nationals could as long as they fulfilled the criteria.
The name suggests the recipient to be from Nepal, during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars many Nepalese men worked in the country being private contractors for various companies, many of them being ex Gurkhas and Indian Army soldiers who could work as Embassy Security guards and on convoy duties etc as Private Military Contractors aka “Mercenaries”.
The war also came about in the middle of the Nepalese Civil War of 1996-2006.
Notably during 2004 12 Nepalese Men were taken by the Iraqi Sunni Insurgent Group Jamaat Ansar al-Sunna and were executed, this brought about full scale riots across Nepal.
America was at the forefront of this and hired many Nepalese men amongst others to fuel the wars, it was said that in 2003 they had 1 contractor for ever 2.5 American Soldiers, and by 2006, it was a 1:1 ratio.
Britain during the Iraq War had as many as 80 PMC Companies operating in the country, oftentimes it was far cheaper than hiring a British Ex Soldier to look overseas instead.
In a Guardian Interview by Alice Ross dated 17th April 2016, James Ellery CBE, formerly a Brigadier in the British Army who commanded the Airborne Life Guards, says:
“James Ellery, who was a director of Aegis Defence Services between 2005 and 2015, said that contractors had a “duty” to recruit from countries such as Sierra Leone, “where there’s high unemployment and a decent workforce”, in order to reduce costs for the US presence in Iraq.
“You probably would have a better force if you recruited entirely from the Midlands of England,” Ellery, a former brigadier in the British army, told the Guardian. “But it can’t be afforded. So you go from the Midlands of England to Nepalese etc etc, Asians, and then at some point you say I’m afraid all we can afford now is Africans.” He said the company had not asked recruits if they were former child soldiers.
Aegis Defence Services, which is chaired by Sir Nicholas Soames, a Tory MP and Winston Churchill’s grandson, had a series of contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide guards to protect US military bases in Iraq from 2004 onwards. From 2011 the company broadened its recruitment to take in African countries, having previously employed people from the UK, the US and Nepal. “
https://www.recordnepal.com/the-nepalis-in-americas-wars
The Record, Nepal posted the following article in 2019 in regard to America’s PMC Nepalese workforce: