Sam Dagher was a fellow in New America's International Security program.
Dagher is an American-Lebanese journalist and author who has worked in the Middle East for more than 16 years. He was the only reporter for a major Western media outlet based fulltime in Damascus in 2012-2014. He was briefly detained by Assad’s henchmen in an underground prison and later expelled for reporting deemed unfavorable to the regime. Dagher contributes to the Atlantic and before that was senior correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and previously reported for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Agence France-Presse. He has covered some of the biggest stories since 9/11 including the conflict in Iraq and Arab Spring uprisings. The Wall Street Journal submitted Dagher’s work from Syria for the Pulitzer Prize and other journalism awards. His book Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria was picked as one of the best of 2019 by the Economist, the Guardian and Kirkus Reviews. Dagher is fluent in Arabic, French and Spanish and conversant in Russian.