Beyond that, both Ahed and Hadeel are Syrian refugees who were imprisoned and tortured by the Bashar al-Assad regime for founding a secular, anti-regime student organization. Come and hear their firsthand accounts of their experiences under Assad’s rule, as well as their assessments of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the administration of Ahmed al-Sharaa (Mohammad al-Jolani).

Ahed is a senior fellow at the Center for Peace Communications, has written for Foreign Affairs, and has worked with Advancing Human Rights and the Extremist Watch Desk at Voice of America.

Hadeel Oueis is the director of Arabic Communications at the Center for Peace Communications. She majored in law and, in 2011, at the age of 18, was arrested by the Assad regime for her key role in the early days of the Syrian protests. In 2012, a U.S. delegation in Geneva met with Oueis and facilitated her relocation to the United States. She now analyzes U.S. policies in the Middle East for major Arabic networks and has reported extensively on the Jews of the Middle East for various Arabic publications.

The founder and President of the Center for Peace Communications, Joseph Braude, is an expert on the nexus of culture and politics in Arab societies and an active presence in the region’s media and policy debates. He studied Near Eastern languages at Yale and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. He developed his Arabic to broadcast quality over a seven-year stint on Moroccan national radio and added Persian to his Arabic and Hebrew as a graduate student at the University of Tehran.