Kevin Knodell

Journalist and Author

Honolulu, Hawaii

Kevin's career has taken him from the deserts of the Middle East to the tropical islands of the vast blue Pacific covering conflict, culture and crime. He has interviewed revolutionaries, mercenaries, refugees, drug dealers, CEOs, Hollywood big shots, sex workers and politicians.

Kevin Knodell

Journalist and Author

Honolulu, Hawaii

Up Late in Erbil: Iraqi Kurdistan's Night Life
In the heart of a region that faces aggression from all sides, a night out can be death-defying. Here’s how a handful of locals do it—from rooftop bars to the underground drag scene. In Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, even locals admit that the summer heat is a kind you never really get used to.
Playboy
ISIS, Assad, and Turkey Are Waging a Shadow War on U.S. Allies in Syria
An enormous fire raged across several wheat fields outside this town on July 6. It was a dry summer day and dark smoke towered over the countryside as the flames spread across the farmland. Some locals watched in awe at the inferno. Others tried to fight back with shovels and rakes. They had little success.
The Daily Beast
He’s Turning Lights on in War-Torn Rural Somalia, One Panel at a Time
Guled Wiliq battles financial restrictions and safety concerns to bring power to his home country. The sun rises and sets in rural Jowhar, Somalia, the same way it does in Phoenix. In order to make sure both places get the most out of it, Guled Wiliq has to start with the basics. “People don’t believe you can make electricity from the sun,” he says.
Ozy
Editor/Coordinator for WIB's Iraq/Syria Field Coverage
War Is Boring Field Coverage of the ISIS Conflcit From June 2014-May 2015
War is Boring
The Strange Saga of the World's Most Expensive Weapon
The F-35 jet can't dogfight and is riddled with glitches, yet we're still paying over $1 trillion for it
Playboy
Zero Dark Dirty: Attraction and Assault in the Armed Forces
This story appears in the July/August 2017 issue of Playboy. With the most dangerous combat positions opening to women, an age-old question resurfaces: How do we deal with sexual attraction—and harassment—on the front lines? Late into her deployment to Iraq, Lieutenant Laura Westley, along with some of her fellow soldiers, decided to go skinny-dipping in the pool at one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.
Playboy
Forty-Five Seconds: Crews unfairly blamed for V-22 crashes
Forty-five seconds of swirling dust was all it took to kill two U.S. Marines and injure 20 other service members.
War Is Boring
Mao's American: The GI That Joined China's Communist Party
Sidney Rittenberg greets me with a faint, friendly voice in the lobby of his condo building in Bellevue, Washington. Ninety-three years old, wearing a striped blue polo shirt and khaki cargo pants, he walks slowly but appears remarkably healthy for his age. If you didn't know his background, Rittenberg would come across as just another nonagenarian retiree in the Pacific Northwest.
The Week
Fighting for the Soul of the Confederacy in the Pacific Northwest
"Everything we're taught in school about the Civil War is wrong," asserts Erik Ernst, commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) at the Col. Isaac William Smith Camp #458 in Portland, Oregon. We'd arranged to meet this SCV group in the great Northwest to discuss their use of the Confederate flag and what it means to them living thousands of miles from the Southern states.
Vice
Displaced, Jobless, Threatened—Arabs in Kurdistan
In February, fighting between Islamic State militants and the Iraqi army drove 41-year-old Salam, a Sunni Arab, from his home in Babil province. He fled with his family to the town of Salahadin, believing it to be safe. He was wrong. The Iraqi army collapsed. Islamic State captured the city of Mosul … and kept advancing.
War Is Boring

About

Kevin Knodell

writing

photography

videography

comics

editing

team leadership

multimedia

trauma reporting

cross cultural communication

Kevin Knodell is a journalist and author. He currently covers the military, security and veterans in Hawaii and the greater Pacific for Civil Beat as a fellow for Report For America, a national nonprofit that places journalists in local news rooms.

Kevin has worked for small town newspapers, national magazines and digital media startups.

His writing and photography have appeared at Playboy, The Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Vice, The Nib, Crosscut and others. As a contributing editor for the digital conflict news collective War is Boring he spent as a year as the coordinator for the Iraq and Syria field team during the Yazidi Genocide and worked with the investigative news team.

Kevin’s most recent assignment before joining Civil Beat was as a correspondent for Coffee or Die Magazine in Iraq and Syria where he covered the consequences of the Turkish invasion of Northeast Syria in the fall of 2019, confrontations between U.S. troops and Iranian-backed militias and how the spread of COVID-19 has complicated both the political and humanitarian landscape of the region. He received the Military Reporters & Editors Association's 2021 award for best overseas coverage for that work.

Kevin is a producer of the podcast Angry Planet, a weekly look at a world in conflict. He’s also the co-author of Machete Squad and The ‘Stan from Dead Reckoning Graphic Novels, was one of the lead writers of the War is Boring: True War Comics series and wrote the Acts of Valor comic series for the magazine Naval History with cartoonist Kelly Swann from 2017-2019.

Kevin has also worked as a comic shop clerk, a paint delivery driver, security guard, event photographer and done various other odd jobs for rent and beer money. He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and studied history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. In his free time he is a mediocre illustrator and okay photographer.