Tenth Annual Terrorism Conference
Wednesday, December 14th
The National Press Club
Grand Ballroom
529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor
Washington, DC 20045
Tickets on Sale Now! Click here to purchase tickets.
About the Event:
The Jamestown Foundation is proud to announce that it will hold its Tenth Annual Terrorism Conference on Wednesday, December 14th. In celebration of this milestone, we are delighted to present a prestigious lineup of some of the world’s leading experts on Islamic State, al-Qaeda and its heirs. With a new administration and a new U.S. president taking office, our tenth annual conference will assess the array of threats facing our nation at a critical juncture in its history.
**Please note that the dress code for this event is business attire or working uniform.
Agenda
Registration
8:15 A.M.–8:40 A.M.
* * *
Welcome
8:40 A.M.–8:45 A.M.
Glen E. Howard
President, The Jamestown Foundation
* * *
Morning Keynote
8:45 A.M.–9:15 A.M.
“Terrorism Challenges for the Next Administration”
Bruce Riedel
Senior Fellow, The Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution &
Former Board Member, The Jamestown Foundation
* * *
Panel One:
The Changing Landscape of Militant Movements
9:15 A.M.–10:30 A.M.
“Jihadist Threats to European Security”
Michael Weiss
Senior Editor, The Daily Beast
“The Global Threat of Salafist Jihadist Groups”
Hassan Hassan
Resident Fellow, The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
“Afghanistan and the Return of the Taliban”
Amrullah Saleh
Former Head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security
Q & A
* * *
Coffee Break
10:30 A.M.–11:00 A.M.
* * *
Panel Two:
Syria, Islamic State and the Regional Powers
11:00 A.M.–12:30 P.M.
“The Future of ISIS in Syria and Iraq”
Sami Moubayed
Research Fellow, St. Andrews University in Scotland
& Founder and President, The Damascus History Foundation
“After Aleppo: Russian Military Power and Strategy in Syria”
Pavel Felgenhauer
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation
“Iranian Strategy in Syria and Iraq”
Alex Vatanka
Senior Fellow, Middle East Institute and The Jamestown Foundation
“The Future of Iraq After the Battle for Mosul”
Douglas A. Ollivant
Managing Partner and Senior Vice President of Mantid International, LLC
& ASU Senior Fellow, New America
Moderator:
Enders Wimbush
Distinguished Senior Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation
& Partner, StrateVarious LLC
Q & A
* * *
Luncheon
12:30 P.M.–1:15 P.M.
* * *
Panel Three:
2017 Trend Lines in Militant Movements
1:15 P.M.–2:45 P.M.
“2017 Trend Lines in Militant Movements: The North Africa-Syria-Afghanistan Nexus”
Jacob Zenn
Fellow of African and Eurasian Affairs, The Jamestown Foundation
“2017 Trend Lines in Militant Movements in Syria”
Nicholas A. Heras
Bacevich Fellow, Center for a New American Strategy (CNAS)
“Jihadist Trends in 2017 After the Defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria”
Michael W.S. Ryan
Senior Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation
Moderator:
Aaron Zelin
Richard Borow Fellow, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
& Founder of Jihadology.net
Q & A
* * *
Coffee Break
2:45 P.M.–3:00 P.M.
* * *
Afternoon Keynote
3:00 P.M.–4:00 P.M.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, USAF (Ret.)
Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency &
Board Member, The Jamestown Foundation
Q & A
* * *
Conclusion
4:00 P.M.
Participant Biographies
Pavel Felgenhauer
Dr. Pavel E. Felgenhauer is a Moscow-based defense analyst and columnist at Novaya Gazeta. Felgenhauer was born in Moscow, Russia, and he graduated from Moscow State University in 1975. He served as researcher and senior research officer in the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Moscow) and received his Ph.D. from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988.
Felgenhauer published numerous articles on topics dealing with Russian foreign and defense policies, military doctrine, arms trade, military-industrial complex and so on. January 1991–January 1993, he was associated with the Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper), in Moscow, as Defense Analyst and Defense Correspondent. From February 1993 until September 1999, Felgenhauer was member of the editorial board and Chief Defense Correspondent of Moscow daily Segodnya (Today). And from May 1994 until October 2005, Felgenhauer published a regular column on defense in the English-language local daily The Moscow Times.
In July 2006, after more than six years as an independent defense analyst, Felgenhauer joined the staff of Novaya Gazeta. Felgenhauer continues to provide regular comments on Russia’s defense-related problems to many other local and international media organizations. Since June 2006, Felgenhauer has also been a weekly contributor to The Jamestown Foundation publication Eurasia Daily Monitor.
Hassan Hassan
Hassan Hassan is a resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. He is also co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, a New York Times bestseller chosen as one of the Times of London’s Best Books of 2015 and the Wall Street Journal’s top ten books on terrorism. He is a columnist with The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and the New York Times, among others. His research focuses on Syria, Iraq and the Arab Gulf states as well as Islamist and Salafi groups. He received a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, USAF (Ret.)
General Michael V. Hayden (USAF Ret.) served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009 and was responsible for overseeing the collection of information concerning the plans, intentions and capabilities of America’s adversaries, producing timely analysis for decision makers and conducting covert operations to thwart terrorists and other enemies of the United States. Before becoming Director of the CIA, General Hayden served as the country’s first Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence—and was the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the armed forces. Earlier, he served as Commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, Director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center, Director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and Chief of the Central Security Service. General Hayden graduated from Duquesne University with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1967 and a master’s degree in modern American history in 1969. He was a distinguished graduate of the university’s ROTC program and began his active military service in 1969. General Hayden is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group in Washington, D.C., and a Board Member at The Jamestown Foundation.
Nicholas A. Heras
Nicholas A. Heras is the Bacevich Fellow in the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). From 2013 to 2014, he served as a Research Associate at the National Defense University (NDU) where he worked on a project that studied the impact of the Syrian conflict on the greater Middle East region. He has over two years in-depth field research experience in all regions of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and has also conducted substantive research in Turkey.
He has presented on the topic of armed groups in the Syrian civil war, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), at the annual U.S. Naval War College, Center for Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups (USNWC-CIWAG) Symposium; he also presented a lecture on ISIL’s state formation strategy to the U.S. SOCOM J3I. As a regular contributor to The Jamestown Foundation’s Militant Leadership Monitor and Terrorism Monitor, Mr. Heras is a prolific author of analytical works focusing on security issues in the greater Middle East region. He has also authored a monograph, Policy Focus #132, The Potential for an Assad Statelet in Syria, through the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)’s Soref Fellowship program.
Sami Moubayed
Sami Moubayed is a Syria expert and author of Under the Black Flag: At the Frontier of New Jihad (IB Tauris, 2015). He has been a research fellow at St. Andrews University in Scotland since 2006, where he helped found the Syrian Studies Center. From 2012 to 2013, Mr. Moubayed was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Additionally, he is the founder and president of The Damascus History Foundation.
Mr. Moubayed is a regular contributor to Gulf News and The Huffington Post. He also is author of Washington’s Relations with Damascus from Wilson to Eisenhower (IB Tauris, 2012). Mr. Moubayed studied at the American University of Beirut and obtained his PhD from the University of Exeter.
Douglas A. Ollivant
Douglas A. Ollivant is a Managing Partner and the Senior Vice President of Mantid International, LLC, a global strategic consulting firm with offices in Washington, Beirut, Baghdad, Hilla and Basra, since 2012. He has also been appointed as an ASU Senior Fellow at the Future of War project at New America. A retired Army officer (Lieutenant Colonel), his last assignment in government was as Director for Iraq at the National Security Council during both the Bush and Obama administrations. Ollivant spent one year in 2010-2011 in Afghanistan as the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to the Commander, Regional Command-East.
Prior to his posting at the White House, Ollivant served in Iraq as the Chief of Plans for Multi- National Division Baghdad in 2006-2007. During this time he led the planning team that designed the U.S. and coalition portion of Baghdad Security Plan, the main effort of what later became known as the “Surge.” He spent an earlier Iraq tour in 2004-2005 in Baghdad, Najaf, and Fallujah. He also taught politics at the United States Military Academy at West Point for three years.
A graduate of Wheaton College, Ollivant holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Indiana University, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies. He is a frequent television commentator on defense and Middle East issues, on networks including CNN, PBS, NPR, MSNBC, ABC, and was a national security contributor with Al Jazeera America. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Political Science Association, he also serves in various advisory capacities to Monument Capital Group, Meridian Hill Advisors, and TranScan LLC. He is working on a book manuscript on the topic of Hybrid Warriors, as well as various manuscripts on the Iraq conflict, 2003-present.
Bruce Riedel
Bruce Riedel is Director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution. He retired in 2006 after 30 years’ service at the Central Intelligence Agency including postings overseas in the Middle East and Europe. He was a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to the last four Presidents of the United States in the staff of the National Security Council at the White House. He was also Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Near East and South Asia at the Pentagon and a senior advisor at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels. He was a member of President Bill Clinton’s peace process team and negotiated at Camp David and other Arab-Israeli summits. In January 2009, President Barack Obama asked him to chair a review of American policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, the results of which the President announced in a speech on March 27, 2009. In 2011, he served as an expert advisor to the prosecution of al-Qaeda terrorist Omar Farooq Abdulmutallab in Detroit. In December 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron asked him to brief the United Kingdom’s National Security Council in London on Pakistan. He is the author of several books: The Search for al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad; Avoiding Armageddon: America, India and Pakistan to the Brink and Back; and What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan. His latest book is JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA and the Sino-Indian War. He is a graduate of Brown (BA), Harvard (MA) and the Royal College of Defense Studies in London.
Michael W. S. Ryan
Michael W. S. Ryan is a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. and an independent consultant. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President at The Middle East Institute (2008-2009). The White House appointed him as Vice President in The Millennium Challenge Corporation (2006-2008). Dr. Ryan also held senior positions in the Departments of State, Defense, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency after joining the U.S. federal government in 1979 as a Middle East/North Africa analyst for the Department of Defense. He is author of Decoding Al-Qaeda’s Strategy: The Deep Battle against America (Columbia University Press, 2013) and a U.S. Naval War College Case Study, “ISIS, The Terrorist Group That Would Be a State,” (available to the public online). Dr. Ryan is currently writing a book on the Heirs of Al-Qaeda and is engaged in research on countering radical extremism with a focus on ISIS ideology. Ryan received his doctorate from Harvard University in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
Amrullah Saleh
Amrullah Saleh served as the former head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) from 2004 to 2010. Prior to that, he lead Department One of NDS whose duties included liaison with foreign military, diplomatic, and intelligence organizations. In 1997, at the age of 24, he was appointed by Ahmad Shah Massoud to head the Afghan Northern Alliance’s office in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where he served as an informal ambassador and coordinator of non-governmental organizations also handling contacts to the CIA. With the fall of the Taliban, he returned to Afghanistan and helped rebuild the country’s intelligence organization. Saleh was born in the Panjshir Province of Afghanistan in 1972 and holds an honorary Doctorate Degree in Analysis Science from Clearly University.
Alex Vatanka
Alex Vatanka is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute and at The Jamestown Foundation. He specializes in Middle Eastern regional security affairs with a particular focus on Iran. From 2006 to 2010, he was the Managing Editor of Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. From 2001 to 2006, he was a senior political analyst at Jane’s in London (UK) where he mainly covered the Middle East. Alex is also a Senior Fellow in Middle East Studies at the US Air Force Special Operations School (USAFSOS) at Hurlburt Field and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at DISAM at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
He has testified before the U.S. Congress and lectured widely for both governmental and commercial audiences, including the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, U.S. intelligence agencies, U.S. Congressional staff, and Middle Eastern energy firms. Beyond Jane’s, the Middle East Institute and The Jamestown Foundation, he has written extensively for such outlets as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, the Jerusalem Post, Journal of Democracy and the Council of Foreign Relations.
Born in Tehran, he holds a BA in Political Science (Sheffield University, UK), and an MA in International Relations (Essex University, UK), and is fluent in Farsi and Danish. He is the author of Iran-Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy, and American Influence (2015), and contributed chapters to other books, including Authoritarianism Goes Global (2016). He is presently working on his second book, The Making of Iranian Foreign Policy: Contested Ideology, Personal Rivalries and the Domestic Struggle to Define Iran’s Place in the World.
Michael Weiss
Michael Weiss is currently a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast, where he focuses mainly on world affairs and culture. He is also a Contributor to CNN and is a regular guest on Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360, and CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.
Weiss has covered the Syrian revolution since its inception in 2011 for a variety of publications, including The Daily Telegraph, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. In 2012, he reported from war-torn Aleppo days after the city had fallen to the anti-Assad opposition. And he is the coauthor of New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, published by ReganArts in 2015, with a revised and expanded edition released in April 2016.
Additionally, Weiss is the Editor-in-Chief of The Interpreter, an online translation and analysis journal originally founded to make news out of the Russian Federation accessible to an English-speaking audience. It has translated two major reports on the alleged graft of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the first by former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and the second by opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption. Cited by presidents, ambassadors, and diplomats, The Interpreter has since evolved into a real-time chronicle of Moscow’s wars in Ukraine and Syria.
Weiss has written extensively on state corruption, from Russia to Angola to Azerbaijan, and on information warfare. He is the coauthor of “The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money,” a white paper on Russian propaganda and disinformation, and “An Invasion By Any Other Name: The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine,” both published jointly by The Interpreter and the Institute of Modern Russia, where he was formerly a Senior Fellow. Weiss is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security.
Enders Wimbush
Enders Wimbush is Distinguished Senior Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation, and Partner, StrateVarious LLC. From 2011 to 2012, he served as Senior Director, Foreign Policy and Civil Society, at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Before joining the German Marshall Fund, Mr. Wimbush served as Senior Vice President of the Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. He spent many years in the private sector with Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International, directing analyses of future security environments for both government and corporate clients. Mr. Wimbush served as a member of the United States Broadcasting Board of Governors during 2010–2012, and during 1987–1993 as Director ofRadio Libertyin Munich, Germany. Mr. Wimbush founded and directed the Society for Central Asian Studies in Oxford, England from 1980 to 1987. Before this, from 1976 until 1980, he served as analyst of Soviet affairs at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.
Mr. Wimbush completed graduate work at the University of Chicago and, as a Fulbright Fellow, at Moscow State University. He is the author, co-author or editor of seven books and numerous articles in professional and popular media, as well as dozens of policy studies. His ideas have appeared frequently in professional, policy and popular media, including The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Commerce, National Interest, Survival, Global Affairs, and The Weekly Standard.
Aaron Zelin
Aaron Y. Zelin is the Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is also a PhD candidate (ABD) at King’s College London where his dissertation is on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement. Zelin is the founder of the widely acclaimed and cited website Jihadology.net and its podcast JihadPod.
Zelin’s research focuses on Sunni Arab jihadi groups in North Africa and Syria. He is also the author of the New America Foundation’s January 2013 study The State of the Global Jihad Online, the June 2014 Washington Institute study The War Between ISIS and al-Qaeda for Supremacy of the Global Jihadist Movement, and the January 2016 Washington Institute study The Islamic State’s Territorial Methodology.
Jacob Zenn
Jacob Zenn is a Fellow of African and Eurasian Affairs at The Jamestown Foundation. He is an expert on Boko Haram and a consultant on countering violent extremism for U.S think-tanks and international organizations in Nigeria and Central Asia. He is the author of “Northern Nigeria’s Boko Haram: The Prize in al-Qaeda’s Africa Strategy,” published by The Jamestown Foundation in 2012 and based on his fieldwork in Boko Haram’s main area of operations in northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon, Chad and southern Niger. Mr. Zenn also writes reports on Nigerian security for The Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor and West Point Combating Terrorism Center.
In February and November 2013, Mr. Zenn provided testimony on Islamist Militant Threats to Central Asia and the Threat of Boko Haram and Ansaru in Nigeria to the U.S. Congress. Mr. Zenn speaks Arabic, Swahili, Chinese, French and Spanish in addition to his native English. He holds a J.D. from Georgetown Law, where he earned the commendation of Global Law Scholar.
