RedState Welcomes Award-Winning Investigative Journalist Hollie McKay to the Team

I am extremely excited to announce that award-winning investigative journalist, foreign affairs expert, and war crimes investigator Hollie McKay has joined the RedState team.

Hollie was with Fox News Digital for over fourteen years where she focused on warfare, terrorism, and crimes against humanity. She will continue covering those topics at RedState, and will also contribute opinion pieces. Her first piece, “How Much of Afghanistan Does the Taliban Really Control?” was just published on our front page.

If you’re not familiar with Hollie’s work, she has worked on the frontlines of several major war zones and covered humanitarian and diplomatic crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and other areas. She has conducted exclusive and detailed interviews with numerous captured terrorists, as well as high-ranking government, military, and intelligence officials and leaders from all sides.

She has also spent considerable time embedded with US and foreign troops, conducted extensive interviews with survivors of torture, sex slavery, and forced child jihadist training, refugees, and internally displaced people to communicate the complexities of such catastrophes and war crimes on local populations. She shares their stories in her book, “Only Cry for the Living – Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield,” which was reviewed by RedState contributor (and friend of Hollie) Dennis Santiago:

[I]t was the human beings McKay encountered while covering the war that filled notebook after notebook. Vignettes of the price that conflict extracts on the displaced, bravely doing their best to endure….There are the stories of real people from the first days of running from the advancing hordes of Daesh, through the suffering of genocide and sex slavery, to the fight to bring a fragmented coalition barely able to tolerate each other to defeat a 21st-century version of the Dark Ages.

You’ll meet people who were betrayed by their neighbors, who lost everything including most of their loved ones, and still somehow persevered. You’ll fall in love with them, even the ones who only live on in memory because Hollie wrote their stories down in her notebook before they died. You’ll see the soldiers of both sides and the toll it took from their souls. You’ll meet the local officials, field commanders, and clerics, far from the capitals, who did their best to bring order to a hell not of their choosing.

She continues to tell survivors’ stories on her Twitter account.

Today we’re talking to Anwar about what he wants to be when he grows up✌️🏻 This gorgeous eight-year-old was burned when a bomb landed on his home in Syria. His baby sister was immediately killed. But thankfully, the US has opened its arms to give Anwar. @helpbcrf @shrinershosp pic.twitter.com/aLyWlLBS8O

— Hollie McKay (@holliesmckay) March 13, 2021

Hollie’s columns have been featured in the Wall Street Journal and her writings referenced in innumerable mainstream publications and academic journals. Additionally, she has won numerous foreign press and humanitarian awards.

When she’s not in the middle of foreign battlefields, Hollie sometimes hangs out in Los Angeles, where she enjoys riding her Harley and spending time at the range.