Blackwater (company)
American private military company
Academi, formerly Blackwater, was an American private military contractor founded on December 26, 1996, by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince. It was renamed Xe Services in 2009, and was again renamed to Academi in 2011, after it was acquired by a group of private investors. In 2014, Academi and Triple Canopy were consolidated into Constellis Group, under the Constellis Holdings umbrella alongside several other private security firms. Academi is still operational as a subsidiary of Constellis Group.
Blackwater began providing services to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, receiving a $5.4 million contract to provide security for the agency's station in Kabul, Afghanistan. Blackwater’s work in Iraq began in mid-2003.
In 2007, Blackwater received widespread notoriety for the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20. Four employees were convicted in the United States and were later pardoned on December 22, 2020, by President Donald Trump.
History
Origins as training center
Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, Inc. was formed on December 26, 1996, by Al Clark and Erik Prince in North Carolina, to provide training support to military and law enforcement organizations.
“Blackwater (company)” enters the record as american private military company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Blackwater, company and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q337233. VIAF identifies the subject as 151643531. The Library of Congress control number is no2007034951. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2009, 2011 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blackwater (company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.