Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumayda'ie (Samir Sumaidaie) is an Iraqi politician and was the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. He was born in Baghdad in 1944 and left Iraq in 1960 to study in the United Kingdom where he obtained a degree in electrical engineering from Durham University in 1965 and a postgraduate diploma in 1966. He returned to Iraq in 1966 but left again for the UK in 1973 after Saddam Hussein seized power. He returned to Baghdad and was appointed member of the Iraq Governing Council in July 2003. He was appointed as Iraq's Ambassador to the United States in April 2006, after previously serving as the Iraq's Permanent Representative to the United Nations (from August 2004), and prior to that, as Baghdad's Interior Minister. He is secular and rejects any sectarian label.