Iraqi-born Herro Mustafa from California will be the next Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States to Bulgaria after having been nominated as Ambassador by President Donald Trump, reported BNT.
Mustafa, who will be replacing Eric Rubin, is a career diplomat currently serving as deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Lisbon, and she was previously the Political Minister Counselor at the US Embassy in India.
In Washington, Mustafa was an adviser to US Vice President Joe Biden, providing counsel on issues related to the Middle East, and she was Deputy Director of the Afghanistan Office in the State Department and the director of the National Security Council.
Herro Mustafa was born in 1973 in Erbil, Iraq, coming from a Kurdish family. She spent two years of her childhood in a refugee camp before her family was granted asylum in the United States in 1976.
She holds a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and a master's degree from Princeton. She speaks nine languages, including Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Farsi, Greek and Turkish.
In the Balkans, she previously worked in the non-governmental sector in Bosnia, and in 1999 at the US Embassy in Athens.