Raed Jarrar

Raed Jarrar is an architect and political analyst currently based in Washington DC. He was born in Baghdad and spent most of his life in Iraq, where he obtained his first degree in architecture at the University of Baghdad. His Master’s thesis in architecture from the University of Jordan examined local methods of reconstruction in post-war Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, Raed Jarrar was the country director of CIVIC Worldwide, the only door-to-door casualty survey in post war Iraq. He also established an NGO called “Emaar” that carried out work in Baghdad and the nine cities of the south in coordinating with local authorities, community leaders and other NGOs.

Raed Jarrar came to the United States in 2005 and has worked on many Iraq-related projects – as a translator, interpreter, consultant, and political analyst. Since the summer of 2006, Jarrar has been active as the Iraq Project Director of the San Francisco-based NGO, Global Exchange where he works at bridging the gap between Iraqi leaders and U.S. Congress members by arranging series of face-to-face meetings between U.S. and Iraqi leaders and facilitating the publication of op-eds and policy papers by Iraqi leaders in U.S. newspapers.

Jarrar is also an analyst and contributing writer for Foreign Policy in Focus and a member of the steering committee of the NY-based coalition United For Peace and Justice.

He maintains his own popular web-log that includes political analysis and news summary regarding and has been featured as an Iraq expert on several media outlets including CNN, CNNi, Aljazeera, Al-Alam, BBC, Democracy Now, Pacifica, BBC, NPR, CBC, CBS, and Fox.