Farhod Salim was took over as Tajikistan’s ambassador to the United States on May 15, 2014. It’s the first ambassadorial post for the long-time member of his country’s Foreign Service.
Salim was born April 30, 1975, in Kurgan-Tyube (now Qurghonteppa), Tajikistan. His father, Abdulmajid Dostiyev, is a former member of the Tajikistan parliament and was more recently an ambassador to Russia. Salim earned a law degree from Tajik State National University and studied computer science at the College of Staten Island in New York.
His first posting as a member of the Foreign Service came in 1998 as an attaché at the United Nations. He returned home in 1999 as second secretary, and subsequently as first secretary, in the Department of International Organizations in the Tajik Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Salim was assigned in 2003 as first secretary in Tajikistan’s Belgian embassy and served as chargé d’affaires for several months at the end of his assignment there.
In 2007, Salim returned to Tajikistan as counselor in the Department of International Organizations. The following year he was made first secretary in the Department of European and American Countries, and shortly thereafter chief of International and Regional Organizations. In 2009, Salim was named to lead the Department of European and American Countries.
He came to Washington in 2011 as deputy chief of mission at the Tajik Embassy, serving as chargé d’affaires for a time in 2012, and has been there since.
One of his priorities since being named ambassador has been to have Tajikistan removed from the list of countries covered by the 1975 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which puts trade restrictions on countries in the former Soviet bloc for having restrictive immigration policies.
Salim is married and has three children.
-Steve Straehley
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