Kholoud Al-Naimi

Kholoud Anbar Al-Naimi is a lieutenant colonel, Director of the Women’s Police Institute, a member of the Recruitment Committee and a commander of sporting events and occasions.

She was born in Wadi Al Sail in 1970 into a traditional, conservative Qatari family of six daughters and one son, of whom she was the eldest.

Her original professional expectation was modest: a post in social affairs. Military service changed both her direction and her character. Before completing her third secondary year, she joined the Ministry of Interior at the end of 1990 and entered the sixth Women’s Police course, which lasted approximately three months. When difficult encounters made her consider resigning, an official contacted her father. He urged her not to retreat, reminding her that she could not change everyone around her and should instead continue developing herself. She stayed, earned the trust of her cohort and placed among the course’s leading trainees.

Graduates were assigned to different centres, but no placement was initially offered to her. The reason soon became clear: officials wanted her to remain at the Police Training Institute because of her discipline, seriousness and ability to persuade and work with others.

Despite initial concern about the heat and demands of the training ground, she accepted and became the institute’s first Qatari female instructor in infantry drill and weapons. She completed instructor-preparation courses with an excellent evaluation. Two years later, colleagues and officials supported her through the fear of training her first cohort, the seventh Women’s Police intake. Its successful completion brought a formal letter of thanks from the institute’s director.

Training responsibilities continued until 2005 and included an exceptional promotion from first warrant officer to lieutenant, a defining advance in her career. In parallel, she pursued a degree in law and political science at Beirut Arab University. Study was divided between Egypt and Lebanon and repeatedly interrupted by professional duties. Beginning in 1993, she postponed completion while training women and forming the Women’s Police Department team, then renewed her focus in 2009 and obtained the degree in 2011.

In 2011, she became Head of the Women’s Police Department and remained in the position for twelve years. She expanded the department’s role, increased foundational, specialist and compulsory courses and built cooperation with schools and public institutions. The result was a self-contained operation staffed entirely by women, from leadership and administration to military personnel and support workers.

At the beginning of 2023, she was appointed Director of the Women’s Police Institute. The institute became an independent entity for women under the Police Academy, standing alongside the Ministry of Interior’s other security departments and marking a new phase in the work she had helped build.

In her first media interview after the foundational course, she had expressed the hope that a dedicated women’s police institute would one day exist. Its establishment three decades later became the achievement she valued most. Her wider responsibilities included cooperation with the Amiri Guard, supervision of special, national and official occasions, membership of recruitment committees for women’s foundational courses and the women’s police-science diploma, leadership of sporting occasions and events, and important contributions during the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

She also established community partnerships through training and joint programmes with public institutions. These included self-defence courses described in the source as serving deaf and non-speaking participants in cooperation with a centre for blind people, and as enabling blind participants to defend themselves. She attended their graduation and was impressed by their discipline and performance; related community activities continued thereafter.

With researchers Dr Amal Sabry and Dr Mohamed Morsi, she entered a 2014 security-research competition organised by the General Secretariat of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Their paper, ‘Raising the Youth of the Arab Gulf’, won second place and was issued in two editions.

Many early challenges arose from being the only woman among a large group of men and from carrying responsibility for developing a women’s unit from a branch into a department and then an institute. She also had to lead women of different outlooks, abilities and levels, learning to include the whole group while maintaining standards.

At first, the shortage of female instructors left her responsible for a large number of trainees at once. Later, training young men brought a different hesitation. Direct experience on the field broke that barrier: despite nervousness on the first occasion, she established control, completed the assignment successfully and earned a strong response from male and female trainees alike.