From the Daily Mail: She has built a national brand as a refugee success story, a child of war, a survivor who fled chaos and found freedom in America. That is the Ilhan Omar millions of voters know.
But a Daily Mail investigation has uncovered a far more complicated – and troubling – backstory. One that reaches deep into the machinery of a brutal African dictatorship accused of genocide.
At its center is Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed.
Multiple first-hand accounts from former Somali military officers, corroborated by archival records and public reporting, indicate that Mohamed was not an ‘educator,’ as Omar described him in her bestselling memoir.
The accounts say he was a senior officer. A colonel in the Somali National Army (SNA). A man stationed in regions where government forces later massacred civilians by the tens of thousands.
Omar wrote a book in 2020 titled, “This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman.” In the book, she portrays her father as simply a family man caught up in a civil war that they were forced to flee from, and downplays his ties to the military regime under Mohamed Siad Barre.
However, the Daily Mail interviewed Somali scholars and retired generals who painted Omar’s father in a completely different light and said he was on the ‘inside the bubble of Siad Barre’s regime,’ under which as many as 200,000 civilians were killed amid an armed rebellion.
One former general told the Daily Mail that Mohamed enlisted in the army in 1966, and said he used a different name in Somalia: “Nur Said.”
After arriving in the U.S., Omar’s father worked as a taxi driver. He died in June 2020 from the Covid-19 virus.
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