Roya Rahmani

Roya Rahmani (born 1978) is an Afghan diplomat who has served as Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States since December 2018.

Rahmani was born in Kabul in 1978, a year before Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. After the Soviets left in 1989, the country descended into civil war. Her school was closed for months at a time and her family eventually fled to Pakistan in 1993. In Peshawar, she attended a Saudi-funded school for refugees, where she later recalled studying on the roof for an entire school year due to overcrowding.

Rahmani returned to Kabul in 1998, but refused to leave the house rather than put on a burqa as the Taliban required. In 1999, she received a scholarship from the World University Service of Canada and went to McGill University, completing a bachelor's degree in software engineering. She completed a master's degree in public administration and international law at Columbia University in New York in 2009. She was a Fulbright scholar.

Rahmani returned to Afghanistan in 2004 and worked for a Canadian non-profit organization dedicated to women's education. She worked for other nonprofits focusing on human rights, before moving to the United States to attended graduate school. She joined the Afghan government in 2011, working in the Ministry of Education and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Rahmani served as Afghanistan's first ambassador to Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations from June 2016. She was the second woman appointed as anambassador by President Ashraf Ghani, after he vowed to give women more leadership positions. She said Muslim women should be recognized as "good negotiators" because they could "embrace people more effectively and tenderly".

On 14 December 2018, Rahmani was appointed Ambassador to the United States by President Ghani, the first woman to hold the position. She took up the post just as President Trump announced his intention to withdraw troops from her country. She said, "women have been treated like a minority, but they are not a minority. Together, the women and the youth are actually a majority, and they are not willing to give up their rights. They are not willing to compromise their human rights and go back to the old days." She replaced Hamdullah Mohib, who had resigned three months earlier to become National Security Adviser.

In May 2019, Rahmani criticized the Trump government after ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad engaged in direct talks with the Taliban, who have rejected engaging in talks with the Afghan government, saying "They are not our government, they are not our representatives" and that ending the war "should be decided by the people who are most affected by the process."

Rahmani is married and has one daughter, born in 2014. She is a Muslim.