UAE-backed assassination campaign in Yemen in 2015. State sanctioned Murder.

There is a particular kind of war that thrives in the gaps—between law and contract, between state and proxy, between what is ordered and what is merely “arranged.” It is in those gaps that this case now unfolding in a US court sits, uncomfortably, insisting on being seen.

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GOLAN

The lawsuit, filed under the Alien Tort Statute, alleges that a group of former American special operations veterans—working through a private outfit known as Spear Operations Group—helped run an assassination program in Yemen on behalf of the United Arab Emirates. The figures alone have a blunt clarity: $1.5 million a month, plus bonuses tied to successful killings. The language in the complaint is colder still—“extrajudicial killing,” “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity.”

This is not a hypothetical argument about the future of warfare. It is a claim rooted in a specific time and place: Yemeni Civil War, where alliances are layered, loyalties transactional, and accountability often dissolves in the heat. The target, in at least one alleged operation, was not a militant leader but a political figure. That distinction matters. It is the difference between war as it is often justified, and something far more ambiguous—political violence carried out under the cover of counterterrorism.

The defendants, including figures such as Abraham Golan, have previously acknowledged the existence of a “targeted assassination program,” while maintaining that it was authorised by a foreign government partner. That defence—if it becomes one—cuts to the bone of the issue. If a state quietly outsources lethal operations to private actors, does the chain of responsibility end with the contractor, or does it climb back up to the state that paid the bill?

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For years, the growth of private military contractors has been framed in pragmatic terms. They are faster to deploy, politically deniable, and—crucially—less visible to domestic audiences than national troops. But the convenience comes at a cost. Contractors operate in a legal grey zone: not quite soldiers, not quite civilians, often beyond the reach of the systems designed to regulate both. When something goes wrong—or is alleged to have gone wrong—the question is not just who acted, but under whose authority, and under which law.

The United States has long wrestled with this ambiguity. From Iraq to Afghanistan, private firms have shadowed official military campaigns, sometimes attracting scrutiny, occasionally prosecution, but rarely systemic reform. What makes this case different is its distance from any declared US battlefield. Yemen was not America’s war in the conventional sense. Yet here are American veterans, accused of participating in a foreign state’s campaign of targeted killings.

It is tempting, particularly for governments, to treat such arrangements as a technical matter—contracts signed, services rendered, deniability preserved. But the law has a longer memory than that. The use of the Alien Tort Statute signals an attempt to bridge geography, to argue that certain acts—if proven—are so grave that they cannot be contained by borders or buried beneath paperwork.

The United Arab Emirates, for its part, has rejected claims that it targeted political opponents, framing its role in Yemen as part of a broader counterterrorism effort. That position will no doubt be tested, indirectly if not directly, as the case proceeds. Yet even if the state itself never stands in the dock, the shadow it casts over the proceedings will be hard to ignore.

What is at stake here is not simply whether one operation crossed a legal line. It is whether the quiet outsourcing of lethal force—so often justified as efficient, flexible, and necessary—can continue without meaningful scrutiny. If private actors can be paid to carry out killings that states prefer not to own, then accountability becomes optional, and the rules of war begin to look less like law and more like suggestion.

There is, of course, a presumption that still holds: these are allegations, not findings. No court has yet ruled on the truth of the claims. But the existence of the case alone is a rupture in the usual silence. It drags into the open a model of warfare that has, for too long, relied on staying just out of view.

And once seen, it becomes harder to pretend that the lines are clear.

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