By Hussein Aboubakr Mansour | October 1, 2021

What began as groundbreaking in the northeastern corner of Iraq with 300 Iraqi, Sunni and Shiite, dissidents and intellectuals uniting to move forward and join the Abraham Accords, has become, in less than one week, a polarizing event in Iraq.

Since then, the central Iraqi government has issued arrest warrants for nearly all 300 participants, and many pro-Iran factions issued strong condemnations of calls for normalization. Given the high stakes in Iraq, not to mention the parliamentary elections in less than two weeks, the controversies over normalization with Israel are inching closer towards the hard Arab-Iranian fault line. 

The conference, called “Peace and Recovery,” was held in the Kurdish capital city of Erbil with over 300 attendees, including many prominent names with strong ties to tribal leaderships. The sudden event shocked Iraqis and non-Iraqis alike.

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Dr. Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at FDD, where he oversees the work of the organization’s experts and scholars. He is also on the leadership team of FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power, a project on the use of financial and economic power as a tool of statecraft.

Jonathan previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he played an integral role in the designation of numerous terrorist financiers. He has held previous think tank research positions at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Middle East Forum.

Jonathan has written hundreds of articles on the Middle East, along with more than a dozen monographs and chapters for edited volumes. His three books have made unique contributions to the field. State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) argues the main roadblock to Palestinian statehood is the Palestinian Authority’s political dysfunction and mismanagement. Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave Macmillan 2008) is still the only book on the market that analyzes the ongoing Palestinian civil war. Al-Qaeda’s Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups and the Next Generation of Terror (Washington Institute for Near East Policy 2004) was the first to explore the al-Qaeda franchises of the Middle East. 

Jonathan testifies often before Congress and publishes widely in the American and international media. He has appeared on American television channels such as Fox News and CNN, and Arabic language television channels such as Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera.