Aaron Y. Zelin

Dr. Aaron Y. Zelin is the Gloria and Ken Levy Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he also directs the Islamic State Worldwide Activity Map project. Zelin is also a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Politics at Brandeis University, founder of the widely acclaimed website Jihadology, and a contributing writer for War on the Rock’s Adversarial newsletter. He is author of the book Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia University Press), which was nominated for the Neave Memorial Book Prize in 2020. His second book, The Age of Political Jihadism: A Study of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was published in 2022 by Rowman & Littlefield. Zelin is currently working on a third book tentatively titled Heartland of the Believers: A History of Syrian Jihadism.

Zelin’s research focuses on Syrian politics in the aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime; he studied the group that took over the country for a decade and a half prior to Assad's departure. He also explores Sunni jihadi groups in the Levant, North Africa, the Sahel, and Afghanistan as well as the trends of jihadi governance, online mobilization, and foreign fighting. He has conducted field research in Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel. Zelin has also testified and served as an expert witness in front of the U.S. House of Representatives and with the Department of Justice in federal judicial terrorism trials.

He is the author of a number of reports including the January 2013 study The State of Global Jihad Online, the June 2014 study The War Between ISIS and al-Qaeda for Supremacy of the Global Jihadist Movement, the August 2015 study Picture Or It Didn’t Happen: A Snapshot of the Islamic State’s Official Media Output, the January 2016 study The Islamic State’s Territorial Methodology, the editor of the June 2017 study How al-Qaeda Survived Drones, Uprisings, and the Islamic State; the January 2018 study The Others: Foreign Fighters in Libya; the September 2018 study Tunisian Foreign Fighters in Iraq and Syria; the October 2019 study Wilayat al-Hawl: 'Remaining' and Incubating the Next Islamic State Generation; the February 2021 study Syria at the Center of Power Competition and Counterterrorism, the May 2022 study The Age of Political Jihadism: A Study of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the September 2023 study Exploiting a "Vast Jihad Arena": The Islamic State Takes Territory in Mali, and most recently, coathored with Institute colleague Devorah Margolin, the 2024 study Jihadist Government and Statecraft.

Zelin received his PhD in War Studies from King’s College London in December 2017. There, he wrote his dissertation on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement, which was nominated for the King’s College London Graduate School Prize for Outstanding PhD Thesis. As part of the PhD program, he was the Sami David Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence from 2013-2015. In 2014, he was also a Gingko Library Scholar in London.

From 2011-2012, Zelin was a Lecturer for the Counterterrorism Practitioner Education Program for the Combating Terrorism Center, at the United States Military Academy. Since 2015, he has been on the Advisory Committee for the Center for Analysis of Terrorism in France. Zelin has also been an Associate Editor of the academic journal Perspectives on Terrorism since 2017. From 2020-2021, he was an Associate Fellow with the the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, which is run by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. From 2020-2023, he also served on the Advisory Steering Committee for the Group of Experts on the Maghreb for the Global Center on Cooperative Security. In 2024, Zelin was appointed as an affiliate for Monash University’s Global Peace and Security Centre.