Former Associate Director Among 21 Killed in Kabul Terrorist Attack

The Atlantic Council mourns the death of Alexandros Petersen, a victim of Friday’s terrorist attack in Kabul that killed twenty-one people. Petersen was a former fellow for transatlantic energy security and associate director of the Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, and had been serving in Kabul as a professor at the American University of Afghanistan. We send our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues on the loss of a young man who followed some of the world’s most challenging issues with enormous passion and an intrepid nature. Petersen was selflessly committed to supporting a democratic transition in Afghanistan. At the Atlantic Council, his work focused on Eurasian energy geopolitics. He was a few months away from completing a biography of Mikheil Saakashvili, and served as an advisor to the European Energy Security Initiative at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Council President and CEO Fred Kempe extended his condolences on Twitter, prompting a number of responses.

Some of Petersen’s work while he was at the Council:

EU-US Energy Coordination Should Focus on Unconventional Gas (December 20, 2011)
Leviathan in the Levant (February 4, 2011)
Egypt Needs Reform, Not Revolution (January 31, 2011)
Who Will Play the Lead in Eurasia’s Pipeline Opera? (January 24, 2011)

Afghanistan