Gregory Waters is a nonresident fellow for the Syria Project in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and writes about Syria’s security institutions and social dynamics. Prior to December 2024, he wrote extensively about the Assad regime’s security services and the Islamic State’s insurgency. Since Syria’s liberation, he has conducted regular fieldwork in rural Syria, focusing on social and political challenges across sectarian lines and the establishment of new local governance and security structures post-Assad. 

Since 2019, Waters has worked as a researcher at the Syrian Archive, assisting in accountability efforts, including providing evidence in support of the November 2023 French arrest warrant for Bashar Assad. From 2017 to 2024, he worked as an analyst at the Counter Extremism Project, where he published monthly reports on ISIS’s activities in Syria. From 2021 to 2023, he worked as a consultant at the International Crisis Group, where he conducted field research in Idlib and northeast Syria and co-authored three reports on nonstate armed group activity across the country.

Waters holds a bachelor’s degree in political economy and foreign policy in the Middle East and a master’s degree in global studies from the University of California, Berkeley.