Hassan Hassan

Hassan Hassan (born 1982) is an American author and journalist of Syrian origin. He co-wrote the 2015 New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror with Michael Weiss. He has written on Islamist groups in the Middle East. He frequently appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, Amanpour and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, and has written for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and The Daily Beast, among others. Hassan is the founder and editor-in-chief of New Lines Magazine, a global affairs magazine.

Background
Hassan is from the town of Al-Shaafah in Al-Bukamal District, Deir ez-Zor Governorate, in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border. In 1996, he moved from ash-Sha'fa to the city of Al Bukamal for high school.

In 2000, he moved to Damascus to study English literature at Damascus University. In 2006, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he completed an MA in International relations at the University of Nottingham.

Journalism
After graduation, Hassan moved to the United Arab Emirates in 2008 to work as a news reporter for the then newly-launched English-language daily The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, covering domestic and Gulf affairs. After the onset of the Arab Spring uprisings, he joined its opinion section as a weekly columnist, and later became the department’s deputy editor.

In particular, Hassan covered the Syrian conflict since the uprising began in 2011. His research on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) included extensive interviews with members of the organization since its rise in his home region in June 2014.

After moving to Washington, D.C., in 2016, Hassan continued writing for The National, and was also a regular contributing writer to The Atlantic. In addition, Hassan has written for The Guardian, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs and the Daily Beast.

Academia
In Washington, D.C., Hassan has been involved in policy research, in parallel to his journalistic work. He specialized in the study of Sunni and Shia militant organizations, as well as Iraq, Syria, and the Persian Gulf.

His research was commissioned by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, European Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, Royal United Services Institute, Brookings Institution, and University of Oxford's Gulf studies forum.

He previously worked as an associate fellow at Chatham House, a senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, a senior researcher at George Washington University, and a director at the Center for Global Policy. He was also a research associate at the Delma Institute in the United Arab Emirates.

Hassan is currently a director at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a think tank in Washington D.C. He was responsible for founding the institute’s Human Security Unit, before establishing New Lines Magazine.

Testifying in Congress
Hassan has advised officials in the United States and the Middle East. In June 2016, Hassan testified before the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the extremist ideology of ISIS, a widely covered hearing. In February 2017, he testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on defeating terrorism in Syria.

Books
In 2015, Hassan authored a book with Michael Weiss on the rise of the militant group ISIS, titled ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. His book was chosen by The Wall Street Journal as one of 10 must-read works on the evolution of terrorism in the Middle East, one of the London Times' Best Books of 2015, and The New York Times Editors' Choice in April 2015. The book was reviewed favorably twice in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. The Times' chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, said the book gave readers "a fine-grained look at the organization’s evolution through assorted incarnations." It has been translated into over a dozen languages.

On December 24, 2019, Hassan published his translation of a speech of Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the commander-in-chief of the Syrian militant group Tahrir al-Sham, the successor organisation of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

New Lines Magazine
Hassan founded New Lines Magazine, a global affairs magazine, in October 2020. Since then, he has acted as its editor-in-chief. The magazine was initially launched by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy to showcase the best writing from the Middle East. Hassan told the Reuters Institute in 2021 that the magazine was launched in response to Western journalists’ reliance on outdated views of the Middle East, which pervades coverage of the region.

In September 2022, Hassan announced that the magazine was broadening its coverage to publish stories from around the world.

Harvard University’s Nieman Lab describes New Lines Magazine’s mission as “to serve audiences that want to read long-form, narrative journalism,” with an emphasis on "local reporting from journalists and experts". The magazine has featured regular contributions by journalists like Clarissa Ward, Arwa Damon or Hala Gorani, and public figures like former U.S. diplomat Robert Ford, Syrian intellectual Mustafa Khalifa or musician Alex Skolnick.