Episode 5: Eyes on ISIS

In the fifth episode, Josh interviews Ido Levy, an alumnus of Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The two discuss ISIS’s global network, U.S. counterterrorism operations, and the difficulty of foreign internal defense in countries affected by jihadist insurgencies. 

About the Guest

Ido Levy is an associate fellow working with the Institute’s Military and Security Studies Program. He is a PhD student at American University’s School of International Service and holds a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He is the author of the book Soldiers of End-Times: Assessing the Military Effectiveness of the Islamic State, now available as a free ebook. For universities, research centers, libraries, and other institutions, free hard copies of the book are available upon request.

In 2015, Levy studied Arabic at Givat Haviva, Israel and, in 2018, received his B.A. summa cum laude in government, counter-terrorism, and global affairs from IDC Herzliya (Reichman University). In Israel, he researched radicalization and deradicalization programs at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and Iraqi political affairs at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

During his graduate studies, Levy conducted further research on Iraq and other countries in the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and ideologies and lethality rates of terrorist groups at the START Consortium. He was also a research and teaching assistant at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Public Policy Review. His work has appeared in ICT, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Middle East Policy, Terrorism and Political Violence, Small Wars Journal, NBC, Jerusalem Post, The Forward, and other publications. He is fluent in Hebrew and speaks Arabic at an advanced level.

Views expressed are personal and do not represent the views of GSSR or any other entity.