Greetings from the field! Spirit of America recently funded a project in Guatemala to help counter narco-trafficking and drug-trafficking organizations that operate near the porous border with Mexico that we first told you about here. We assisted a US Army team in...
I was just in Bosnia and Herzegovina to support a swift water rescue training event put on by the US military. I traveled to Brčko District with the US Army Civil Affairs team to see the training first hand and meet the first responders who were receiving the...
SoA has been active in Lebanon for the past two years, supporting multiple lines of effort aimed at bolstering the country's stability and security. Bordered by Syria and Israel and host to more than one million Syrian refugees, Lebanon holds a vital spot in the...
Dear supporters, In January of 2016 gunmen linked to al-Qaeda stormed a hotel and restaurant and murdered 30 people in Ougadougou. This was the deadliest of the recent terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso where extremist incidents are on the rise. As violent extremism...
The second part of my recent trip to Syria had a more southerly focus. The US Army civil affairs team and I toured Ayn Isaa, a ghost town roughly 40 miles north of Raqqah, the capital of the Islamic State. Given the prevailing atmosphere of religious discord and...
Hello, I recently returned from a trip to Burkina Faso, where I had the opportunity to travel alongside our US military partners as they assessed local needs, met with Burkinabé counterparts, and provided training to their partner force. Overall, I was incredibly...
Dear supporters, I recently traveled to Syria with a US Army team to explore ways SoA might be able to ease local suffering while furthering US objectives on the ground. I’ve been to Syria a number of times, but this trip in particular was different. I had the...
Despite the bloody conflicts roiling across both, my military flight from Iraq to northern Syria was a routine affair. I was traveling into Syria with three goals in mind: to meet with the US Army Civil Affairs teams, assess the humanitarian situation on the ground,...
Earlier this year I wrote an update about the incredibly heroic efforts of the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) in the outlying areas of Mosul. CTS is a primary US partner in the coalition against ISIS and, coincidentally, a force I advised some years ago. A...
