- Special Advisor
- Special Advisors
Manal Omar is the Associate Vice-President for the Middle East and Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace. Previously, she was regional program manager for the Middle East for Oxfam – Great Britain, where she responded to humanitarian crises in Palestine and Lebanon. Omar has extensive experience in the Middle East. She worked with Women for Women International as regional coordinator for Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan. Omar lived in Baghdad from 2003 to 2005 and set up operations in Iraq. She launched her career as a journalist in the Middle East in 1996. UNESCO recruited her to work on one of her first lead assignments in Iraq in 1997-1998. Omar also spent more than three years with the World Bank’s development economics group. She has carried out training programs in Yemen, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Kenya and many other countries.
She is the author of Barefoot in Baghdad: A Story of Identity — My Own and What it Means to Be a Woman in Chaos published by Sourcebooks in 2010. Omar’s activities have been profiled by the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, NPR, Glamour, the London Times and Newsweek. Her articles and opinion pieces have appeared in the Guardian, the Washington Post, Azizah Magazine and Islamica Magazine.
Omar is on the advisory board of Peaceful Families Project, an organization with international reach that recognizes domestic violence is a form of oppression that affects people of all faiths, and an active member of the American Muslim community. She was named among Top 500 World’s Most Influential Arabs by Arabia Business Power in 2011, and among the 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World by Georgetown University and The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in 2009. In 2007, Islamic Magazine named her one of the ten young visionaries shaping Islam in America. She holds a master’s degree in Arab studies from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from George Mason University.