Washington: A few months before his arrest by the National Investigation Agency in Kolkata for allegedly training ethnic militias in Myanmar, Matthew Aaron VanDyke was urging one of his colleagues to visit that country. The Kachin and Chin people were “really serious about Christianity” and fighting a “mostly Buddhist military junta,” VanDyke said in a text message. Pastor Dr William Devlin, an associate who has been in touch with the self-styled American freedom fighter, told HT that he knew VanDyke was in Myanmar and was “not surprised” by the news of his arrest.
“I knew he was there (Myanmar). I wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing. He just said he was training people in Myanmar,” said Devlin, who has known VanDyke for a decade and traveled with him to Ukraine.
VanDyke and his Sons of Liberty International (SOLI) have spent much of the last decade deployed to warzones, training Assyrian Christian communities in Iraq to resist ISIS, and working with Ukrainian civil defense units to respond to Russia’s invasion of their country. During that time, VanDyke has built a public image that is partly humanitarian, partly crusading revolutionary.
HT spoke to VanDyke’s colleagues like Pastor Devlin and scholars who have studied SOLI to better understand the organization and the man behind it.
After graduating from Georgetown University, the training ground for America’s foreign policy and intelligence elite, VanDyke spent years traveling to West Asia and North Africa as a documentary filmmaker, an occupation that gave him easy access to countries in the region. That changed in 2011 when the then-31-year-old faced popular protests and mass uprisings against autocratic regimes in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring. With no military experience, VanDyke signed up to join Libya’s armed rebel groups fighting to bring down strongman Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled the country for more than 40 years.
VanDyke wrote in 2012 about his reasons for joining, “My ideological belief in freedom and democracy built over years in the region, combined with my strong friendships in Libya, compels me to take up arms as a freedom fighter. Had it not been for my friends I would not have gone.”
However, soon after signing up as a rebel fighter, VanDyke was captured by Libyan government forces and spent nearly six months as a prisoner of war before escaping from Abu Salim prison in August 2011. VanDyke later said, his time in prison also strengthened his Christian faith. A few months later, Gaddafi fell from power and VanDyke boarded a flight back to the United States.
But VanDyke’s capture and subsequent escape to Libya gave him something very valuable: a public profile. This was further enhanced by “Point and Shoot,” an award-winning documentary released in 2014 that tells the story of Libya and the tumultuous months that led to the fall of a regime through VanDyke’s eyes.
Soon, VanDyke became a familiar face on television news, invited as an expert on international security and conflicts in West Asia, at a time when the US entered a new conflict in the region to prevent the rise of ISIS. In 2014, VanDyke announced that he was leaving his career as a filmmaker to raise a “Christian army” in Iraq that would push back against ISIS, which was at the time making stunning military gains in Iraq and Syria. That was the beginning of SOLI, which recruited former US military personnel to train Assyrian Christian communities to resist ISIS attacks. Yet SOLI insists it is not a mercenary group.
“Groups like SOLI are unusual organizations that sit somewhere between classic humanitarian NGOs and private military companies. They present themselves as non-profit “combat charities”; they raise money from donors, then use it to provide military training and advice to local forces they see as victims of aggression (for example, Assyrian Christian militias confronting ISIS in Iraq), while working for paying state clients. Instead of,” says Pavol Kosnak, a researcher at the Slovak Academy of Sciences who studied and interviewed SOLI. VanDyke in Iraq.
Unlike major private military contractors, SOLI has been registered as a tax-exempt, non-profit organization since January 2015. According to returns filed by SOLI with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the group says it receives all of its income through contributions and grants.
In Iraq, SOLI trained more than 300 personnel for the Nineveh Protection Unit (NPU), a small local militia composed of Assyrian Christians who were recruited to oppose ISIS at the height of its power in 2014. According to Kosnak, VanDyke and SOLI provided training equipment, protective gear, body armor, walkie-talkies, and other military support to the NPU and another militia, the Ninveh Protection Force (NPF).
However, SOLI raised significant controversy during its time in Iraq.
The group never clarified whether it had received the relevant permission from the US State Department to train foreign militia groups, which it was legally required to do. VanDyke told the American media outlet Mother Jones that the State Department had approved his activities in Iraq, a statement that was later denied by American diplomats in Iraq. Several former US military trainers recruited by VanDyke left the job due to concerns that they were working illegally in Iraq.
The State Department did not respond to HT’s query on whether SOLI had received permission to train foreign military groups.
Despite these controversies, VanDyke and SOLI have continued to operate. VanDyke’s following continues to grow, with his public social media profiles boasting nearly 1 million followers across various platforms. Meanwhile, SOLI claims to have been active in raising funds to oust the government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela in 2018. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, VanDyke and SOLI deployed to Ukraine with a team of 10-12 trainers and initially provided military training to civil defense forces, including the use of “non-lethal equipment,” according to the group’s website. Now, SOLI says it is helping the Ukrainian Defense Forces develop prototypes of battlefield technology to aid their fight against Russia.
Pastor Devlin says the founders of SOLI, now in Indian custody, are driven by a desire to fight for the underprivileged.
“His motivation has always been to serve the underprivileged as he did in Libya, Iraq, Kurdistan and as he was doing in Myanmar. He wanted to work with those fighting for freedom against oppressive harsh governments.”
But it’s also clear that VanDyke and those who are funding SOLI are motivated by a desire to support Christian minority populations globally.
“A lot of our supporters are people who care about Christian persecution and what’s happening to people of their faith,” VanDyke said in a 2016 documentary.
Myanmar has drawn the attention of Christian advocacy groups in the United States as the country continues to suffer a brutal civil war, Devlin says. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has alleged that Myanmar military authorities have destroyed churches, taken forced labor from Christians and taken over areas in Chin and Kachin states, where many of Myanmar’s Christians live.
“Myanmar and the issue of the persecuted Christian minorities there is always in focus for all of us volunteers, who are sometimes made up not only of NGOs and civil society organizations. We also have people from the US government on the phone and people from the State Department,” says Devlin.
Despite SOLI’s diverse work globally, it is unclear whether the organization has the necessary resources. Documents filed by SOLI with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service show that the group has struggled with inconsistent fundraising. For example, while the group received about $250,000 from donors in 2017 and 2022, that number dropped to about $62,000 in 2024, the most recent year for which data is available. Furthermore, group expenses often exceed donor contributions.
In 2024, SOLI expenses were more than $104,000, leaving the organization with a deficit of more than $40,000. The same was true in 2023, when spending exceeded donor contributions by nearly $118,000. VanDyke often said he had very little money, Devlin recalls.
Nothing can be said with certainty about VanDyke’s relations with the US government. His arrest in Kolkata last week led to some speculation that Indian officials were concerned about the possibility of spying in India’s northeast and Myanmar. Kosnak says he is not aware of SOLI’s relationship with the US government.
“In Iraq, I found no evidence that SOLI was a branch of the US government or military. They operated in a gray zone: US officials knew about them, but there was no sign of official sponsorship or command.
Their resources or access also did not indicate such support – they often struggled in areas that one would imagine a sanctioned US operation would not have, such as gaining access to local Kurdish officials, getting materials through Erbil airport, funding, etc. That said, many things can change in 10 years, especially if US foreign policy has seen serious changes over the years,” Kosnak told HT.
Nevertheless, VanDyke claimed that he was in contact with American diplomats. In a 2016 documentary, VanDyke is filmed arriving in Washington DC for the express purpose of meeting diplomats at the US State Department.
Kosnack’s study of SOLI operations in Iraq also found that SOLI members accompanied Assyrian delegations to meetings with State Department officials on several occasions.
In response to HT’s questions about VanDyke’s arrest, a State Department spokesperson said Washington is aware of the situation, but would not comment further due to privacy concerns.
In the absence of concrete facts, concerns, controversy, and questions about VanDyke and SOLI’s activities in Myanmar have only increased.
