Hassan Hassan is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of New Lines Magazine, an initiative of the New Lines Institute. Before he established the magazine and started working on other initiatives, he founded the institute’s Human Security Unit.
Previously, he was Senior Fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. He has also been an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program in London and a research associate at the Delma Institute in the United Arab Emirates. From 2008 to 2014, he worked on the news and commentary sections at the UAE English-language daily, The National.
Hassan has written extensively on Sunni and Shia movements, society, and politics in the Middle East for numerous publications including the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Financial Times, the Daily Beast, and The National. He has also testified before Congress on extremism, and has frequently advised senior policymakers in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Hassan frequently conducts training courses for military personnel and diplomats specializing or operating in the Middle East, on Salafi-jihadism and tribal dynamics as well as other related issues.
He is the author, with Michael Weiss, of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. His internationally acclaimed 2015 book was a New York Times bestseller, and was selected as one of the Times of London’s best books of 2015 and as one of the Wall Street Journal’s top 10 books on terrorism. The book was translated into more than a dozen foreign languages.
A native of eastern Syria, Hassan received a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Nottingham. He tweets at @hxhassan.
Tucked in a 100-page document that a dissident group within the Islamic State released in 2018 was an incredible story about a miracle. The biographical document was meant to chronicle the life of an Iraqi jihadist from being a young man with an ambition to raise pigeons to becoming one of the most influential ISIS leaders.
Three years have passed since Qatar became embroiled in a geopolitical rift with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt.
Current trends in Iraq and Syria indicate that the Islamic State has entered a new yet unstable phase of recovery wherein it remains prone to military pressure from forces in Iraq and Syria but is projecting strength in villages and suburbs across the two countries.
Since its tumultuous birth after the coup in 1952, the modern Egyptian republic has been a battleground in the struggle between a military-dominated secular regime and Islamism.
