SASNET director Andreas Johansson interviewed the scholar Orwa Ajjoub, who joined SASNET in January 2020, on the role of Al-Qaeda in the Afghan peace talks.

Orwa Ajjoub is an affiliated researcher at SASNET. In 2018, Orwa graduated from Lund University with an MA in Middle Eastern Studies. Interested in Islamic theology and political Islam, Orwa wrote his thesis about the theological aspects of the split between Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS in 2013. Although his interest has been mainly focused on Jihadi-Salafi groups in the Middle East, Orwa has written articles about Syrian society during the war and particularly about LGBTQ Syrians in Europe. His work has been published on different media websites such as Syria Deeply, Huffington Post, and World Policy. During the last two years, Orwa has been participating in academic conferences such as The Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies NSMES and Lund University conferences for Middle Easter Studies CMES. In addition to his MA thesis, Orwa presented papers discussing al-Qaeda's presence in Syria, theological differences between AQ and IS and the role of prisons system in radicalization. Additionally, Orwa has been writing journalistic articles for two platforms; The Conflict Archives and the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies’ blog.

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