Father of Ilhan Omar, Nur Omar Mohamed (Credit: public domain)
Federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington-area home early Monday as part of an ongoing criminal fraud investigation. Sources told Fox News the probe centers on immigration paperwork filled out by her late father when she was a child. Omar called it political intimidation. The timing is ugly for her preferred story.
For years she has sold America the clean version. Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was an educator. The family fled Somalia’s civil war with the rest of the refugees and arrived in 1995. Her 2020 memoir paints the same picture of ordinary people escaping chaos. An exclusive in the New York Post now says that version is false.
Historian and Oxford doctoral researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told the Post that Nur “misrepresented himself as a refugee” to U.S. authorities. He was a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime.
“Ilhan’s father was never an educator,” Ingiriis said. “Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end. He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they ‘fled’ to live comfortably in the United States.”
“He only fled when the dictatorship fell in 1991. He was the beneficiary of the military regime and should not have been given asylum whatsoever.”
Nur joined Somalia’s military in the late 1960s. Reports differ on whether he trained in the Soviet Union or Egypt. After Barre seized power in the 1969 Soviet-backed coup, Nur rose through postings in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, and Garbahaarrey.
Former army officer Yusuf Ismail Faraton, who served with him and later moved to Minneapolis, said Nur led multiple brigades, became a regiment commander, and played a significant role in the Somali-Ethiopian war of 1977-78. After the regime collapsed he ran the Daynuunaay military school. The family went to Kenya first, then claimed refugee status in America.
Barre’s regime killed as many as 200,000 people. In the north it conducted a campaign against the Isaaq clan that flattened cities with aerial bombardment, poisoned wells, and laid more than a million landmines on grazing lands. A 2001 United Nations investigation concluded the Somali government conceived, planned, and carried out genocide against the Isaaq. Ingiriis said Nur assisted the dictator in remaining in power for so long because he was protecting his career and his colonel rank.
U.S. immigration law is clear. It bars refugee status for “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.” (Read more: J.D. Rucker, 10/13/2026)