A grim look at how Colombia has become the world's top supplier of hired soldiers, fueling wars in Ukraine, Yemen, and Sudan — bad news for global conflict zones and the impoverished veterans pulled into them.

• Thousands of Colombian ex-soldiers now fight as mercenaries worldwide, drawn by pay several times their tiny home pensions.
• The UAE is the biggest employer, sending them to Yemen and secretly to Sudan's brutal civil war, where they've been tied to massacres, ethnic cleansing, and training child soldiers.
• In Ukraine, Colombians are now the largest group of foreign fighters, often pushed to the front lines with little pay protection or honor when they die.
• The pipeline traces back to old US and Israeli training programs and Blackwater's Eric Prince, who built the UAE's mercenary army on a "hire no Muslims" rule.
• Many are recruited under false pretenses — promised guard duty, then routed into atrocities they can't easily refuse.

Outlook: Demand is growing, with new deployments to Congo and Haiti, so the flow of Colombian fighters into the world's dirtiest wars looks set to keep rising.