U.S. Embassy & Consulate
in Iraq

Mark Stroh is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and the new Consul General at U.S. Consulate General Erbil. He most recently served as the Team Leader for U.S. Embassy Kyiv’s external platform based in Rzeszow, Poland. Previously, Mr. Stroh was the Consul General at U.S. Consulate General Karachi, Pakistan, from 2021 to 2022. Before arriving in Pakistan in August 2021, he served as the Acting Assistant Secretary and Managing Director for International Media in the State Department’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs (GPA). He came to GPA in December 2018 and served as the Bureau’s Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for most of his tenure. Prior to that, he was the Team Leader of the Syria Transition Assistance Response Team (START) Forward in northeastern Syria from 2017-2018. There, he led an interagency team of civilians embedded with U.S. Special Operations Forces managing the provision of humanitarian assistance and the restoration of essential services in areas of Syria liberated from ISIS, for which he was awarded the 2018 Ryan C. Crocker Award for Outstanding Leadership in Expeditionary Diplomacy.

His overseas postings include Kuwait City, Kuwait; Basra and Al-Hillah, Iraq; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Kabul, Afghanistan; Islamabad, Pakistan; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In Washington, he has served on the staff of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2009-2011), as a Director for Strategic Communications and Assistant Press Secretary on the National Security Council staff and later Deputy Spokesman of the National Security Council (2015-2017), and as acting director of the Press Office in the Bureau of Public Affairs (2017).

Before joining the Foreign Service, Mr. Stroh was a journalist working for several daily and weekly publications including the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a daily beat reporter from 2000 to 2002. Mr. Stroh has a BA in History and Political Science from Randolph-Macon College, where he graduated Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1994. He has an MS in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Translation: Kurdish