Qutaiba Idlbi is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs where he leads the Council’s work on Syria. His experience includes researching the framework of political imprisonment in Syria as the Syria expert at the International Center for Transitional Justice, analyzing economic sanctions and forced displacement as a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, profiling refugee entrepreneurship in Turkey and Jordan with Building Markets, analyzing security policy in Turkey and Syria at the Global Policy Institute, and developing governance and security atmospheric reports for the US Joint Special Operations Command with Pechter Polls and the USAID Office of Transitional Initiatives with Caerus Associates.

Charles Lister Charles Lister is a senior fellow and the Director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute. His work focuses on all-things Syria and on issues of terrorism and insurgency across the Levant. Within MEI, Lister currently directs two major international initiatives focused on Syria: Resolving the Detainee Crisis is a joint initiative with the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR), which seeks to help the international community resolve the unprecedented challenges associated with the detention of 9,000 terrorist fighters and 45,000 associated family members in northeast Syria. In collaboration with the Atlantic Council and the European Institute of Peace, the Syria Strategy Project is coordinating discussions involving more than 80 subject matter experts and 25 governments and Syrian governance entities aimed at developing a holistic and realistic multilateral approach to resolving Syria’s long-running crisis.

Caroline Rose is the Director of the Strategic Blind Spots Portfolio at the New Lines Institute, where she leads and produces research on the intersection of defense, security, illicit trades, and geopolitical landscapes from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa. Her portfolio at the institute includes two projects: the Project on the Captagon Trade and the Project on Post-Withdrawal Security Landscapes. Previously at the institute, Rose served as the head of the Power Vacuums Program. As of fall 2023, she is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service teaching a graduate course on the nexus of illicit economies, armed conflict, and insecurity. 

Sina Azodi previously worked as a research assistant at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Sina is also visiting scholar and a professorial lecturer of international affairs at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he teaches a graduate course on Iran’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Dr. Azodi is a frequent commentator on both English- and Persian-speaking media, including BBC, Sky News, Al-Jazeera, TRT World, and i24. His analysis has appeared in Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Association, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Middle East Institute, and has been quoted by the New York Times, Newsweek, Spiegel, and Forbes. Dr. Azodi has published the chapter “The Fusion of Politics and Religion in Iran” in the edited book Political Islam in the Gulf Region. He earned his BA and MA in international affairs from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, and PhD from University of South Florida.