Countering Terrorism in the Middle East: A Situation Report

The Middle East Institute (MEI) is pleased to host a public panel on countering terrorism in the Middle East, featuring high-level panelists representing the United States, the United Nations and the United Kingdom: Ambassador James Jeffrey, Edmund Fitton-Brown and Jessica Jambert-Gray. The territorial defeat of ISIS’s self-declared Caliphate in March 2019 was a significant victory in the fight against terrorism, but the ISIS threat remains urgent and widely distributed across the Middle East and beyond. Al-Qaeda meanwhile, has faced a series of challenges in the years since the Arab uprisings of 2010 and 2011, with some of its affiliates appearing to have learned lessons from the past and adapted their strategies towards operating more durably, within existing and likely intractable local conflicts. That pursuit has been a defining feature of Iran’s regional strategy, in which local militant proxies - some designated terrorist organizations - are built and consolidated in order to become permanent fix