Ghassan Atiyyah is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on Iraqi politics. An outspoken member of the Iraqi democratic movement in exile during the regime of Saddam Hussein, in April 2003 he returned to Baghdad as director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy (IFDD), a nongovernmental organization devoted to independent secular liberalism. With the cooperation of American and European institutions, as well as the UN, the IFDD convened meetings and conferences aimed at national reconciliation and power sharing in Iraq. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Dr. Atiyyah served as an advisor to the Iraqi foreign ministry in Baghdad and Iraq's UN Mission in New York.
For fourteen years starting in 1991, he was editor-in-chief of the journal al-Malaf al Iraqi ("The Iraqi File"), an Arabic-language monthly published in London. In 1986, Dr. Atiyyah founded the publishing house LAAM in London, serving as its director until 2004. He left Iraq in 1980, moving to Tunis to join the staff of the Arab League, first as director of information and later as editor-in-chief of the journal Shun Arabiya.
Dr. Atiyyah was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2006 and previously lectured in politics at Baghdad University. He is the author of Making of Iraq 1908-1921, among other works, and contributes regularly to foreign and Arabic-language journals and newspapers.
Education: Ph.D., University of Edinburgh; B.A., American University of Beirut
