Omer Ismail
Omer Ismail is Sudan’s Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs. He took on this position in the Cabinet reshuffle of July 2020. He was previously Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. Before joining the transitional Sudanese government, he was a humanitarian and activist working to publicize conditions in Darfur. He was forced to flee Sudan in 1989 following after the National Islamic Front took power in 1989. He subsequently worked for the United Nations, and was a Policy Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government in the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University in 2006/2007.
Omer was born in the Darfur region of Sudan. After graduating from Khartoum University, he worked as research assistant to Dr. Mansour Khalid, former Sudanese Minister of Foreign Affairs. After fleeing Sudan, he worked for the United Nations in Somalia between 1992 and 1994. Returning to Washington, D.C., he helped found the Sudan Democratic Forum, a think tank of Sudanese intellectuals working for the advancement of democracy in Sudan, as well as co-founding the Darfur Peace and Development Organization to raise awareness about the crisis in his troubled region.
