En France, on est les meilleurs et c’est dur pour les états-uniens :
▻https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/France.html
“French Foreign Legion: U.S. citizens interested in joining the French Foreign Legion (FFL) should be aware that the cognitive and physical tests for acceptance are extremely challenging.”
#légion_étrangère (première utilisation de ce mot-croisillon sur SeenThis ?)
How a ragtag crew of leftist revolutionaries and soldiers of fortune helped defeat ISIS
▻https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/untold-story-syria-antifa-platoon-666159
How a ragtag crew of leftist revolutionaries and soldiers of fortune helped defeat ISIS
I first met Karim Franceschi in November 2016, in the hills of northeastern Syria, at a remote compound everyone called the Academy. It was a former oil facility that had been turned into a training camp for the volunteers from the U.S. and Europe who were coming to battle the Islamic State with the Kurds. A lot of the fighters were soldier-of-fortune types, veterans of the French Foreign Legion or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but at least half were militant leftists like Franceschi, an avowed communist who wore a Mao pin on the lapel of his camouflage uniform. He had been one of the first to arrive, in October 2014, and by the time we met, he had seen more combat than any other Westerner around.
listening to Franceschi’s disquisitions on late capitalism, spiced with mordant asides on the Syrian Civil War, it was easy to fall under the sway of his charisma.
“A capitalist society is a shit society,” he said, “just as Egyptian society with the pyramids and pharaohs was a shit society. What we’re fighting for in Rojava is a socialist alternative.”
Franceschi was one of a motley mix of anarchists, Marxists and eccentric humanitarians who had come to take part in an obscure armed struggle known as the Rojava Revolution, the Kurds’ improbable attempt to establish an egalitarian democracy in a Belgium-size region just south of Turkey, known as Rojava. Like a lot of the volunteers, he saw it as his generation’s version of the Spanish Civil War, another conflict that attracted radical leftists from all over the world. But while tens of thousands of foreigners fought in the anti-fascist International Brigades between 1936 and 1938, 500 at most had showed up to defend the Kurds against the Islamic State, their chief nemesis. “In this revolution, the Western volunteers are basically a joke,”Franceschi told me. “A historic moment is being lost.”
Target Africa
▻https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/target-africa
U.S. Africa Command — the umbrella organization for U.S. military activities on the continent, known as Africom — insists that it maintains only a “small footprint” in Africa and claims that Camp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion outpost, is its only full-fledged base. However, a number of new facilities have been opened in recent years, and even Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has acknowledged that Lemonnier serves as “a hub with lots of spokes out there on the continent and in the region.”
What You Need to Know About Joining the Russian Army | Business | The Moscow Times
▻http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/what-you-need-to-know-about-joining-the-russian-army/514256.html
Tried to join the French Foreign Legion and didn’t make the cut? Don’t fret — the Russian military has created its own force of foreign citizens to fight Moscow’s wars.
The Russian Defense Ministry last month announced that foreigners could enlist in the Russian military, a move ostensibly aimed at legalizing the status of citizens of former Soviet republics already serving, but its ranks are open to all foreigners — provided they speak good Russian and have clean criminal records.
President Vladimir Putin signed the new policy into force on Jan. 2, five years after the proposal had originally been made.
Now “foreign servicemen can participate in operations during martial law, as well as in armed conflicts, in accordance with [the] generally accepted principles of international law, international agreements and Russian legislation,” said the order, published on the Kremlin website.
Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defense think tank, explained to The Moscow Times that the change was finally implemented to provide legal status to locals already serving on Russian bases in Armenia and Tajikistan.
(…)
By allowing foreign citizens to join its ranks, the Russian military has moved beyond most other modern militaries. Typically, foreigners are allowed to join another nation’s military only after establishing residency, or by special agreements between their governments.
In the U.S., for example, foreigners can only join the military if they are permanent residents with a green card. While service in the U.S. military does not in itself entitle a foreigner to U.S. citizenship, foreign contractors will be eligible for Russian citizenship after their five-year contract is concluded.
In this way, the Russian military is taking a page from the French Foreign Legion, which since the 1800s has existed as a largely foreign-staffed military force. Legionnaires, who historically have served on the front lines of France’s wars, can apply for citizenship after three years of service with the French Foreign Legion, or immediately if wounded in action.
Instructions pour les candidats (en russe uniquement, mais sa connaissance est une des conditions)
Информация для кандидата
▻http://contract.mil.ru/enlistment_contract/info.htm