How Georgetown Qatar Scholars Became Key Voices Explaining the U.S.–Israel War on Iran

Afternoon classes were underway on Sept. 9, 2025, when the building at Georgetown University in Qatar began to shake. Students in a Gulf politics class watched as their professor, Dr. Mehran Kamrava, paused before saying, “That is a bomb. Class is over.”

Within minutes, the campus shifted into emergency mode. Staff moved quickly to account for students, gather information, and issue updates. Inside the atrium, students sheltered together, scrolling through breaking news and watching events unfold in real time.
Then they saw something that made them pause. 

On Al Jazeera, their professor appeared on screen, explaining what had just happened: Israel had bombed Qatar.

For many students, the shock was immediate, but so was the sense of orientation. The person helping the world understand the moment was the same one who had just guided them out of the classroom.

“He gave insight on what the bombing means for living in this region,” said Daphne Soriano, a student in her second year. “It made me feel safer to know that our professors have long been tracking events in the Middle East and understand the stakes.”

It was not the first strike tied to the widening conflict. Months earlier, Iran had targeted a U.S. airbase in response to President Donald Trump’s initial attack in June 2025. By early fall, the war had begun to draw the region in more directly, with Qatar caught in the crosscurrents of escalation.

No one at GU-Q was harmed. But the experience sharpened something that would define the months ahead: the role of the university’s faculty as both educators in the classroom and interpreters of war for a global audience.

Dr. Kamrava, who has written extensively on Gulf and Iranian politics, including Righteous Politics: Power and Resiliency in Iran, quickly became one of the most sought-after voices as the conflict deepened. His phone began ringing with requests from international outlets.
“At first it was every other day, then every day, and now I get calls two to three times a day,” he said.

He approaches each appearance with a clear purpose: to slow down a fast-moving story, correct misconceptions, and place events within a longer historical arc. At the same time, he keeps his focus on what often gets lost in moments of escalation — the human stakes, the urgency of a ceasefire, and the possibility of restoring some form of regional order.

“That Iran is still standing proves my hypothesis,” he said. “Here’s a political system where its military commanders are gone, its supreme leader is gone. It’s the only country in the world that has been attacked twice by two nuclear powers. We’re approaching 40 days and it’s still standing.”

By late February, the war entered a new phase. U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran expanded, and Iran responded with attacks on U.S. targets across the region. The conflict no longer felt distant. It unfolded in the airspace above and in the infrastructure around the Gulf.

For faculty at GU-Q, the pace intensified. They moved between classrooms, television studios, and live radio hits, often within the same day, helping students and viewers make sense of events that refused to slow down.

Dr. Paul Musgrave, a U.S. politics expert, became a regular presence on BBC, Sky News, and Al Jazeera English, explaining Washington, DC’s strategy and the shifting dynamics of the Gulf while adjusting to his first year living abroad with a young family.

The overlap between analysis and lived experience was immediate.

“I will never forget driving into the Al Jazeera complex on the first night of the war, listening to QBS Radio as it broadcast the Maghrib adhan, and hearing the retort of an interception just overhead,” he said.

For Dr. Noha Aboueldahab, a professor of international law, the war collapsed any remaining distance between theory and reality. Even while on leave, she continued speaking with international media and participating in academic forums, all while managing her children’s schooling from home after closures during the bombing.

During a European Society of International Law roundtable on “The Use of Force and its Fallout,” the subject of discussion became inseparable from the moment itself.
“It was both ironic and surreal,” she said. “We were talking about international law and the use of force as it was happening in real time. I had to stop a couple of times to check alerts and move away from the windows.”

The conflict also reached into domains often overlooked in coverage of war. As U.S. and Israeli strikes hit a desalination plant in Iran, and then Iran targeted desalination facilities in the Gulf, concerns about water security moved to the forefront.

Dr. Raha Hakimdivar, a hydrologist and science policy expert, fielded requests from outlets around the world — France 24, Sky News, Brazil’s TV Globo, the Christian Science Monitor and Al Jazeera — all seeking to understand what the strikes could mean for access to water in an already vulnerable region.

“What amazed me was just how global the interest was,” she said. “People from very different parts of the world wanted to understand what this meant for resource security, especially water.”

Across disciplines, a pattern took hold. GU-Q faculty became a steady presence in global coverage, translating a fast-moving and often disorienting conflict into something more legible — not only for viewers and readers, but for their own students, who were living through it.

The work carried a sense of obligation.

For Dr. Aboueldahab, that responsibility leaves little room for hesitation.

“It is not right to stay within the cocoon of academia when you research, write, and teach on topics that affect millions of people,” she said. “If you have something insightful to say, you should say it.”