By Felix Light and Filipp Lebedev
(Reuters) – An Iraqi citizen fighting with Russia’s Wagner mercenary force was killed in Ukraine in early April, the first confirmed case of a Middle East native dying in the conflict, the RIA FAN news website reported.
Iraqi national Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner Group hospital in the Russian-controlled, eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, RIA FAN said.
It said he had been wounded in Bakhmut, the city in Donetsk province that Prigozhin said Wagner had taken in mid-May, after a battle that had raged since last year.
In an interview with a pro-Russian blogger, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said the whole conflict had cost 20,000 of his men’s lives.
In video published by RIA FAN, a man identified as Witwit’s father is shown receiving awards posthumously given to his son, and that he had supported his decision to enlist in Wagner as a “volunteer”.
“Abbas always pursued his freedom and wanted to be a man who defends his freedom and himself, and he told me he found his freedom in Russia,” he is shown saying.
Prigozhin did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Much of the fighting for Bakhmut was done by convict fighters, recruited by Wagner from prisons on the promise of a pardon if they survived six months at the front in Ukraine.
According to court papers seen by Reuters, Witwit was in July 2021 sentenced to four and a half years in prison on drug charges by a court in the Russian city of Kazan.
The documents said that Witwit was a first year student at a technical university in Kazan when he was arrested by police with a large quantity of cannabis.
Reuters was not able to confirm that Witwit was in prison when recruited by Wagner.
(Additional reporting by Timour Azhari in Baghdad; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Mark Heinrich)
