Matthew VanDyke - Some 3 Letter Agency Dude With An Obsessive Compulsion For Publicity
- Matthew VanDyke: US citizen held in Libya emerges on Syria's frontline - Guardian, Nov 9 2012
An American who fought alongside Libyan rebels, and who was detained in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison for six months before returning home to Baltimore in late 2011, has turned up on the frontline of the uprising in Syria.Matthew VanDyke said that he was in Aleppo to film a documentary alongside the Syrian rebel army. But he claims he is also advising the rebels on weaponry based on his experience in Libya.
"I go to sleep and wake up to the sound of artillery shells, and Assad's jets flying overhead and bombing the city," VanDyke, 33, wrote in the first of a series of emails with the Guardian. "Most of these booms signal the death of more civilians in Aleppo."
VanDyke claims to be a journalist-turned-freedom-fighter-turned documentarian, but others accuse him of being a misguided thrillseeker who repeatedly puts himself at risk.
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He said he was also offering advice on weaponry, including the anti-aircraft Dushka machine guns he used while fighting in Libya, though that claim has been questioned by people who know him and who have spent time on the ground in Syria.
- Matthew VanDyke and Obsessive Compulsive Freedom Fighting, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Apr 12, 2015
Yet for all the exciting adventures VanDyke experiences, it is impossible to get out of one’s head the idea of a reenactment, of middle-aged office workers walking through the woods in Civil War uniforms and young men playing paintball between mounds of dirt. It is all so clumsy, so sad and trivial. He travels to Afghanistan to place an American flag in Bin Laden’s house. He makes the first real friends of his life in combat. Van Dyke’s whole life, his whole idea of freedom, consists in this idea of acting, repeating typically dangerous situations under the gaze of the camera; and while the adventures he finds himself in are ostensibly new, they feel old and worn out. VanDyke very much wants to believe otherwise. He wants to believe his experiences are immediately made hallowed through the ever-present camera, which turns the ephemeral and pointless violence he witnesses, the aimless and meandering journey he travels, into something much more. But it doesn’t quite come off. The camera instead dictates his adventures, hollowing out his experiences, transforming a war and people’s lives into an unfunny Jackass skit.
- This Guy From Baltimore Is Raising a Christian Army to Fight ISIS…What Could Go Wrong? - Mother Jones, May 28 2015
In late February, a Baltimore-born, self-proclaimed freedom fighter named Matthew VanDyke beamed into Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News show from Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region. A few days earlier, he had announced on Facebook that he was in Iraq to “raise and train a Christian army to fight” ISIS and that he had formed a company called Sons of Liberty International (SOLI) to provide “free military consulting and training to local forces fighting terrorists and oppressive regimes.” For months, the so-called Islamic State had terrorized Iraq’s Assyrian Christians, forcing many to flee their homes and villages and seek safe haven among the Kurds. With ISIS on the march across Iraq and Syria—and making headlines for its brutal beheadings of journalists and aid workers—the story of an American taking an on-the-ground role in the fight sparked a media frenzy. VanDyke, who is 35 and holds a master’s degree in security studies from Georgetown, was soon featured by media outlets across the country, including the New York Times, USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, and MSNBC.
This wasn’t the first time VanDyke had become a media sensation. A few years earlier VanDyke had made international headlines after he was captured in Libya, where he had been fighting alongside rebel forces to overturn the regime of Moammar Qaddafi. He eventually escaped, and he would later say that his Christian faith deepened during his six-month imprisonment. A filmabout VanDyke, who had traveled across the Arab world by motorcycle, won best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2014.
- Why American veterans are dropping everything to train Ukrainians - Christian Science Monitor, May 11 2022
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The war in Ukraine has attracted U.S. military veterans and Western legionnaires like no foreign battlefield in recent memory. But what motivates midcareer professionals – often now married, with children, and with their former military lives receding into memory – to drop everything and step into the trenches of another nation’s fight?
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“In the past, we didn’t get involved in Ukraine because, when it was just involving Donbas, there was no way to have an effect on the outcome of the conflict. Now there is,” says Matthew VanDyke, who founded SOLI in 2015. The former documentary filmmaker was motivated at the time by his own experiences being held captive for five months in Libya while fighting with Libyan revolutionary forces in 2011.“It’s also just a very clear conflict, with a democracy being invaded by essentially an authoritarian state, and a land grab,” says Mr. VanDyke, who wears a beard, hair combed back, and tactical military clothes. “It’s a no-brainer as far as right and wrong in this.”
Well, if you say so ...
Posted by b on May 12, 2022 at 6:57 UTC | Permalink
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