Sayed Zafar Hashemi

Zafar Hashemi is an Afghan-American who served as special advisor on Afghanistan for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). He now works as public relations officer at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he worked as the political counselor at the embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. He was also the deputy spokesperson of the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani until January 2017.

Life and career

An ethnic Tajik, Hashemi fled Afghanistan as a child to Pakistan during the Taliban regime. He later resided in the U.S. to study, achieving a bachelor's degree in political science at the University of Maryland and a master's degree in public administration at Johns Hopkins University. Before immigrating to the United States in 2007, Hashemi managed communication and public affairs of Afghanistan Stabilization Program under the Interior Ministry, and prior to that he was a journalist and a radio presenter for Nawa 103.1 FM in 2007, and later at AWAZ. He later became a television presenter and journalist at Voice of America in Washington DC.