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Mohammed Alaa Ghanem is a Washington-based policy strategist, Founder and CEO of the advisory firm DCInsights, and Chief Policy Adviser at the Syrian American Council. A native of Damascus, he served at the outset of the Syrian uprising as an editor at the digital platform that issued the original call for peaceful protests in Syria, and as a strategist for the nonviolent protest movement. As the war unfolded, he traveled repeatedly into opposition-held Syria to support local councils and civil society, monitoring Aleppo’s first free elections in half a century.
In Washington, he built organized Syrian American advocacy from scratch and is one of its principal architects. Over fifteen years he worked with both parties on Syria legislation — from the first congressional bill to support the vetted Syrian opposition through the Caesar Act and the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act. On December 8, 2024, the day Assad fled Damascus, he issued the first public call to lift U.S. sanctions on Syria, reported that day by the Wall Street Journal. He then spearheaded the community’s efforts that turned that position into law within a year. Since the regime’s fall he has traveled repeatedly to Damascus, and in February 2025 served as a delegate to Syria’s National Dialogue Conference and its constitutional working group.
He has advised senior U.S. officials across four administrations and testified before Congress. His research has been published by Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Chatham House, his commentary by the New York Times and the Washington Post. A former assistant professor at Damascus University, where he also earned his degrees, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Eastern Mennonite University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.
Alawites in Syria breaking silence?: Criticizing the dictatorship from within
Recently, a notable trend has emerged among Alawites in Syria’s Assad regime-held areas, including those from powerful families. Writers, journalists, and rank-and-file Alawites have taken to social media platforms to express their deep frustration with the regime’s economic policies and the centralized nature of the dictatorship under President Bashar al-Assad, as well as his wife Asma al-Assad’s outsized influence and corruption linked to her secretive “economic council.”
