Bente Scheller

The head of the Middle East Department of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS) has been a sought-after interlocutor in the media on security policy issues in the Middle East for many years. From 2002 to 2004, she was a counter-terrorism officer at the German embassy in Damascus before completing her doctorate on Syrian foreign policy at the Free University of Berlin. In 2008, Scheller headed the Syria program at the Aspen Institute in Berlin for a year. She then took over the management of the HBS office in Kabul, followed by the foundation’s office in Beirut in 2015. In 2019, she returned to the foundation’s headquarters in Berlin.