From the Daily Mail: Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar has built her political brand on a familiar story: the refugee girl who fled war, embraced America and rose to the halls of power championing universal healthcare, immigrant rights and progressive causes.
But new photos, archival material and historical accounts from her native Somalia obtained by the Daily Mail paint a far more complicated – and troubling – portrait of the Minnesota lawmaker’s backstory.
The material includes images linking Omar and her relatives to some of the most feared figures in Somalia’s modern history, including Major General Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan — the man known as the ‘Butcher of Hargeisa’ for atrocities committed in the late 1980s.
The documents also highlight the military career of Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, an officer in the Somali National Army (SNA) under longtime dictator Mohammed Siad Barre.
While Omar has long described her family as victims of the civil war that tore Somalia apart in 1991, critics and activists from the breakaway Somaliland region say her father wasn’t merely an ordinary soldier caught in the chaos — but part of the regime’s state machinery.
In their report, the Daily Mail dives into the history of the war-torn country of Somalia, and notes that Omar has always claimed she was a poor refugee whose family were fleeing the horror or war, in which up to 200,000 civilians were killed in an orchestrated campaign of rape, torture, executions and aerial bombing.
However, one activist from Somalia reportedly said, “But her father and grandfather [Abukar] were high-ranking officials in the same regime that committed unimaginable brutality.”
READ MORE from the Daily Mail.
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