Holy....

I knew that there were mercenaries active in Iraq.

I didn't know just how many of them there are:

Via Avedon at The Sideshow, I found this lovely Washington Post article about private contractors (who for some reason we no longer call mercenaries) running amok in Iraq. The Post article states the official number of contractors in Iraq is approximately 127,000, but that's a lowball estimate since the CIA and intelligence arms of the various armed services are also employing private contractors and the exact number of how many they've hired is classified. Obviously, not all of them are engaged in combat-related activities but most of them are.

...

This article from The Indypendent puts the number of contractors at 180,000....

To put that in perspective, there are currently about 162,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

That's a helluva lot of mercenaries.