Edmund Fitton-Brown

Edmund Fitton-Brown is a Senior Visiting Fellow at The Soufan Center, focusing on the United Nations, sanctions, and transnational terrorism, with a focus on al-Qaeda and ISIS. He is a former British diplomat. He graduated from Cambridge University and joined the Foreign Service in 1984. His career included postings in Finland, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Italy and the United Arab Emirates; and culminated as UK Ambassador for Yemen. He joined the United Nations in 2017 as an Expert with the ISIL/Al-Qaida/Taliban Sanctions Monitoring Team before taking over as Coordinator in January 2018, a position which he held until July 2022. He speaks Arabic and is a specialist in the Middle East, regional security and international counterterrorism. He led on the development of numerous UN reports on al-Qaeda and ISIS, widely considered a standard reference for practitioners, and worked closely with UN entities and states on sanctions measures. He has appeared and been quoted extensively in a range of media on counter-terrorism, Afghan and Middle Eastern issues and has delivered keynote speeches on these issues at high-level events on four continents.