Former UFC middleweight and Army Green Beret Tim Kennedy was reportedly shot multiple times in an ambush in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while working a private contract, and he lived through it. MMA Weekly reported that the attack happened on Sept. 17, that Kennedy was part of a three-man squad that came under fire in Central Africa, and that the worst of his wounds were three gunshots to the leg. The evacuation reportedly took close to eight hours. Kennedy was then medevaced back to the United States for treatment, and he’s in stable condition, according to the same report.
The other two men in that squad weren’t as fortunate. Lance Corporal Justin Conaglen, a former member of New Zealand’s SAS, was killed in the attack. A third operative, who hasn’t been named, was also wounded. New Zealand authorities have opened an investigation into Conaglen’s death.
Why the group was in Congo at all hasn’t been officially explained. MMA Weekly noted rumors tying the operatives to a U.S. private military firm associated with Erik Prince, the American businessman who founded Blackwater. Other reports claim the squad may have clashed with Russia’s Africa Corps during the operation. Neither claim has been confirmed, and both should be treated as rumor until somebody goes on the record. That may take a while. None of the survivors has commented publicly, which MMA Weekly attributed to the operational security and non-disclosure rules that come standard in private military contracting.
The news spread through MMA circles on Thursday. A Strength N Strikes post that circulated on Facebook was reposted to r/MMA, where a user summed up the fan reaction in plain terms: “Wish him the best, always loved Tim.” An earlier thread on the same subreddit asked the obvious question, “the hell is he doing there?”, and right now nobody with firsthand knowledge is answering it.
For anyone who only knows Kennedy from his cage days, his résumé outside the Octagon has always been the longer one. He’s a decorated Army sniper and special forces operator who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’s never been shy about telling stories from those deployments. He fought in the UFC as a middleweight contender, but the fight world mostly hears about him these days through that military career, and this week that’s the only part of his life anyone is talking about.
What comes next is mostly on New Zealand’s side of the ledger. Its investigation into Conaglen’s death is the one formal process anyone has confirmed, and it could end up producing the first official account of what happened on Sept. 17. Kennedy hasn’t said a word publicly, and if the non-disclosure terms are as strict as reported, he may not for some time.
I handicap fights for a living, which means I spend a lot of hours arguing about whether a guy can survive a bad second round. Three rounds in the leg and an eight-hour evacuation is a number I can’t put into any model. The rumors about Prince and the Africa Corps will get louder before they get confirmed or killed, and I’d ignore them until there’s a name attached. The confirmed fact that matters most is that Justin Conaglen didn’t come home, and that’s who New Zealand’s investigators are working for.
