Regional Perspectives on the Gulf War: Stability, Security, and Strategic Responses
Featured Speakers: Victoria J. Taylor, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Dr. H.A. Hellyer, Dr. Lina Khatib, and Anas Alqaed.
Bios:
Anas Alqaed (moderator)
Director of Programs, Gulf International Forum
Anas Alqaed is the Director of Programs at Gulf International Forum. In addition to his role, he has conducted extensive research on political and social changes in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, and the power and influence of paramilitary groups throughout the Middle East. Before joining the Gulf International Forum, Anas worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for 10 years in Syria IDP Operation, Iraq Refugee Operation, and Libya Refugee Operation. At UNHCR, he specialized in refugee community resilience, capacity-building for governmental and non-governmental organizations, and community mobilization. Anas holds Master’s in International Public Policy with Middle East concentration from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Victoria J. Taylor
Director of the Iraq Initiative, Atlantic Council
Victoria J. Taylor is director of the Iraq Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East program. A national security leader with over two decades of experience in the Middle East and Europe, she led large interagency teams and advanced U.S. economic and national security interests as a Deputy Assistant Secretary, Deputy Chief of Mission, and at the White House National Security Council. Prior to joining the Council, Taylor served as a career Senior Foreign Service Officer with the rank of Minister Counselor. She served most recently as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iraq and Iran in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, where she advised senior State Department leaders on Iraq and Iran in the aftermath of the Gaza conflict. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations and diplomatic history from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in development studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş
Fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings Institution; Director, The Turkey Project
Prior to joining the foreign policy community in 2016, Aydıntaşbaş had a long career in journalism, during which she focused on Turkey, its domestic evolution, and foreign policy in an age of regional reshuffling and geopolitical competition. Aydıntaşbaş combined her tenure in Turkish media with overseas assignments and international commentary, straddling between Turkey and the United States.
From 2016-24, she was a Global Opinions columnist for The Washington Post. In her columns for The Post, Aydıntaşbaş tried to document Turkey’s emergence as a regional power with a quest for strategic autonomy, the changing nature of Turkey’s relations with its trans-Atlantic partners, as well as the country’s democratic backsliding. Aydıntaşbaş contextualized Turkey’s drift towards illiberalism with the decline of the rules-based liberal international order and the onset of great power competition, facilitated domestically by the rebirth of a non-aligned Turkish ideology.
Dr. H.A. Hellyer
Senior Associate Fellow, Royal United Services Institute for Defence & Security Studies (RUSI); Senior Fellow in Geopolitics and Security, Center for American Progress
Dr. H.A. Hellyer is Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence & Security Studies (RUSI) and Senior Fellow in Geopolitics and Security at the Center for American Progress, bringing more than twenty years of transatlantic policy experience to the analysis of political risk, regional order, and strategic competition across the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Following fellowship and scholarly roles at Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Dr. Hellyer now provides strategic analysis at the intersection of geopolitics, security, and geoeconomics, with particular expertise in Gulf security dynamics, Arab state hedging strategies, and the reconfiguration of regional alliances. He was appointed Deputy Convenor of the UK Government’s Taskforce on Tackling Radicalisation and served as the first Economic & Social Research Council Fellow in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, bridging academic rigor with operational policy experience across governmental and corporate advisory environments.
His analysis appears regularly on CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera, and he has published in the Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Politico, and the Guardian. He is the author of nine books and more than twenty peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and policy monographs. X/Twitter: @hahellyer
Dr. Lina Khatib
Associate Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House; Visiting Scholar, Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.
Dr. Lina Khatib is an associate fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, Principal Analyst at ExTrac, and visiting scholar with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Previously, she was director of the SOAS Middle East Institute and Professor of Practice at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London. Prior to that, she served as director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House and director of the Carnegie Middle East Center at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She also co-founded and led the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and was a senior associate at the Arab Reform Initiative. She has published several books and is a frequent writer and commentator on current affairs in the Middle East.