See more of our coverage in your search results.
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, wasn’t who he purported to be, a source told The Post.
The Minnesota congresswoman — whose home was raided by the feds on Monday as part of an ongoing criminal fraud investigation — has long described her father as an “educator” who fled his country’s devastating civil war alongside millions of others and arrived in America with his family as a refugee in 1995.
But, an expert scholar exclusively told The Post that Nur “misrepresented himself as a refugee” to US authorities when he was really a prominent military commander in the Somalia dictatorship that killed as many as 200,000 people.
“He was a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime,” historian and Oxford University doctoral researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told The Post. “Ilhan’s father was never an educator.
He added, “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.”
Nur, born in the Somali coastal town of Bandarbeyla in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, joined Somalia’s military in the late 60s, with conflicting reports suggesting he trained in the Soviet Union or Egypt.
He allegedly played a key role in Siad Barre’s army after the bloodthirsty dictator seized power in a Soviet-backed coup in 1969.
Nur, who died from COVID-19 complications in June 2020 at age 67, lived a life worlds away from the civilian teacher portrayed in Omar’s 2020 memoir titled “This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman,” Ingiriis claimed.
The soldier climbed up the military ranks to colonel through postings in Mogadishu, Hargeisa and Garbahaarrey — Barre’s hometown which served as a key military base — under his “real name” Nur Said.
“He only fled when the dictatorship fell in 1991,” the scholar told The Post, adding that Nur must have lied to US authorities about his military experience.
“He was the beneficiary of the military regime and should not have been given asylum whatsoever.”
US immigration law strictly forbids granting refugee status to “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.”
Nur is said to have led multiple military brigades, become a regiment commander in Barre’s regime and played a “significant role” in the Somali-Ethiopian war between July 1977 and March 1978, according to former army officer Yusuf Ismail Faraton who served with him and also moved to Minneapolis.
In a bid to keep his dictatorship alive, Barre ordered the massacre of civilians in the Isaaq clan living in the north, now the self-governing Somaliland.
The campaign saw entire cities flattened due to aerial bombardment, wells poisoned and more than a million landmines laid on grazing lands.
Ingiriis believes that Nur was complicit in Barre’s crimes because he “assisted the dictator to remain in power for so long” and “he was protecting his career and his colonel position.”
Nur’s military career came to an end when Barre was ousted in 1991 after two decades of oppression, but Ingiriis claims he was loyal to the dictator even after the brutal regime ended, having run the Daynuunaay military school.
He escaped with his family to Kenya before they arrived in the US as refugees and later settled in Minneapolis where he was no longer “the affluent colonel he was in Mogadishu,” Ingiriis noted. Nur worked as a taxi driver and postal worker to make ends meet.
“I think it is very wrong for the United States to host war criminals,” Ingiriis said. “This creates a constant resentment and sadness among the real victims who were terrorized by the military regime under which Nur Said loyally served.”