Aaron Y. Zelin

Dr. Aaron Y. Zelin is the Richard Borow 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, and Founder of the widely acclaimed website Jihadology. 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. Zelin is currently working on a second book tentatively titled Heart of the Believes: A History of Syrian Jihadism.

Zelin’s research focuses on Sunni jihadi groups in Syria, North Africa, and Afghanistan as well as the trend of jihadi governance, online mobilization, and foreign fighting. He has conducted field research in Tunisia, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Turkey. Zelin has also testified and served as an expert witness in front of Congress and in judicial cases.

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, and most recently the May 2022 study The Age of Political Jihadism: A Study of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

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 2020-2021, Zelin 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. Since 2017, Zelin has been an Associate Editor of the academic journal Perspectives on Terrorism.University Press.