Ilhan Omar loves telling voters her family fled Somalia’s chaos as innocent refugees.
Her allies call any question about that story a racist smear.
And one Oxford historian just pointed to the job her late father actually held.
The Educator Who Kept a Driver and a Guarded Compound
Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) published her memoir, This Is What America Looks Like, in 2020. In it, she sums up her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, in two words. He was “an educator.”
That’s it. No rank. No uniform. No mention of the army that kept dictator Siad Barre in power for more than two decades.
But a few pages later, Omar lets a detail slip that doesn’t fit the picture. “Our family of civil servants and teachers was well off enough to have a guarded compound and driver,” she wrote.
Somalia at the time ranked among the poorest countries on earth. Schoolteachers there didn’t usually come with a chauffeur named Fatah and armed men at the gate.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty spotted the gap in a late-October edition of his Morning Jolt newsletter. And the answer sat in plain sight the whole time, inside an obituary a friendly Minnesota news outlet published after Mohamed died of COVID-19 complications in 2020.
Sahan Journal described him as an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army. The outlet wrote about a “prestigious career in the military” that ended in 1991, when Barre’s government collapsed and the country fell into civil war.
He was a colonel.
Barre’s Army Left a Long, Bloody Paper Trail
Readers who remember the Cold War may recall Siad Barre as one of those strongmen who cozied up to Moscow before switching sides. The people of northern Somalia remember him very differently.
Through the 1980s, Barre’s military waged a campaign against the Isaaq clan in the region now called Somaliland. A 2018 report in The Nation put the death toll from 1987 to 1989 alone at roughly 200,000. Human Rights Watch, in a 1990 report, estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 people died in the nineteen months after war broke out in May 1988, many of them civilians caught under air strikes and artillery aimed at cities like Hargeisa.
A State Department report commissioned in 1989 called the pattern of ethnic targeting “unmistakable.”
Mohamed Haji Ingiriis, a Somali scholar and doctoral researcher at Oxford, told the New York Post that Omar’s father was no bystander to that government. “He was a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime,” Ingiriis said. “Ilhan’s father was never an educator.”
Ingiriis didn’t stop there. “Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end,” he said. “He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they ‘fled’ to live comfortably in the United States.”
According to Ingiriis, the colonel’s postings over the years included Hargeisa, the same city Barre’s forces pounded in 1988. He didn’t say when Mohamed served there.
Nobody has produced an order bearing Mohamed’s signature, and no court ever charged him with anything. Snopes has insisted for years that no evidence shows he committed war crimes.
But the questions don’t need a signed order to matter in an immigration file.
One Word in Federal Law Changes Everything
Here’s where a family history turns into a legal headache.
Federal immigration law spells out who qualifies as a refugee, and it carves out a hard exception. “The term ‘refugee’ does not include any person who ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Look at the word “assisted.” The statute doesn’t require a man to pull a trigger himself.
Mohamed brought his family to the United States in 1995 and reportedly naturalized in 2000, the same path Omar says carried her to citizenship. If his refugee status rested on a story that left out a colonel’s career in a regime accused of genocide, investigators will want to know who knew what back in 1995.
Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington, DC home in October as part of a probe into possible immigration fraud. Prosecutors have not charged her, and she denies any wrongdoing.
Washington Already Ran This Play on Another Colonel
Anyone who thinks a 35-year-old Somali army file is too stale to matter should look up Yusuf Abdi Ali.
Ali, known as Tukeh, served as a lieutenant colonel under Barre and commanded the Fifth Brigade in northwest Somalia in 1987 and 1988. After the regime fell, he went to Canada and later settled in the United States as a permanent resident, where he lived for years in the Virginia suburbs and even drove for Uber.
In May 2019, a federal jury in Virginia found him liable in a civil suit for torturing a Somali herder. HSI’s war crimes unit opened an investigation into his whereabouts in March 2020, and agents arrested him in November 2022. An immigration judge ruled in February 2024 that Ali personally engaged in torture, and ICE put him on a plane back to Somalia that December.
Same army. Same era. Same agency now combing through the Omar family’s paperwork.
And Ali held a lower rank than Omar’s father.
None of that proves Mohamed did what Ali did. But it does show the federal government treats the question as serious business, even three decades later, even after the man in question built a quiet life in American suburbia.
Who Vetted the Colonel in 1995?
The refugee pipeline of the 1990s moved enormous numbers of Somalis into Minnesota, Ohio, and elsewhere, often on paperwork no screener could check against records from a country that no longer had a working government.
That’s the trouble with high-volume resettlement. When the numbers run that large, screening gets thin, and a colonel’s whole career can shrink down to one word like “educator” without anyone at the counter batting an eye.
Somaliland’s own foreign minister told The Nation in 2018 that nobody in Barre’s government could plead ignorance. “I think everybody was aware of what was happening,” he said.
And Barre’s regime showed little patience for officers who objected. Human Rights Watch reported that the government executed about eighty military officers in Hargeisa for opposing the handling of the war.
Mohamed’s career, by Sahan Journal’s own telling, kept rolling until the regime itself fell.
The Story Keeps Changing Shape
The Congressional Black Caucus statement after his death called him “a teacher and trainer.” The memoir called him “an educator.” Sahan Journal called him a colonel. His daughter’s long-deleted Father’s Day tweet called him by yet another name.
Every one of those versions can’t be the whole truth at the same time.
Geraghty’s newsletter flagged one more wrinkle from the memoir. Omar wrote that she was eight years old when civil war broke out, in a chapter titled for the years 1989 to 1991. If she was eight in 1989, she was born in 1981, not 1982 as she now claims, and that single year carries enormous weight in any derivative citizenship case.
But the father’s career may end up mattering more than the birth year. Omar can always blame a birthday mix-up on some clerk in a Kenyan refugee camp. A colonel’s rank is a lot harder to misplace.
Her defenders will say a daughter shouldn’t answer for her father’s career, and nobody is accusing a little girl of anything that happened in Hargeisa.
But Omar chose to write that memoir. She chose the word “educator.” And she built an entire political brand on a refugee story while her allies branded anyone asking about the missing chapters a bigot.
Homeland Security Investigations spent 32 months tracking down a lieutenant colonel from Siad Barre’s army. Ilhan Omar’s father wore a higher rank.
Sources: National Review, “What Did Ilhan Omar’s Father Do in Somalia?” (Jim Geraghty, The Morning Jolt); New York Post via Western Journal (Mohamed Haji Ingiriis interview); Sahan Journal obituary of Nur Omar Mohamed; Snopes, “Still No Evidence Ilhan Omar’s Father Committed War Crimes”; Somaliland Chronicle; US Immigration and Customs Enforcement news releases on Yusuf Abdi Ali; Center for Justice and Accountability, Warfaa v. Ali; Homeland Security Today; Fox News; Human Rights Watch (1990); The Nation (2018).
