Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-5) is already facing problems after the authorities raided her home. But now, more information is coming out about her father’s ties to a brutal dictator.
An expert told The New York Post that he believes Nur Omar Mohamed, Omar’s late father, “misrepresented himself as a refugee” to U.S. immigration authorities.
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.
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Nur Omar Mohamed served as a colonel in Siad Barre’s Somali National Army from the early 1970s until the regime collapsed in 1991. He commanded a regiment in the Ogaden War and stayed a senior officer through the Isaaq GENOCIDE. That campaign killed an estimated 200,000 civilians, leveled most of Hargeisa with aerial bombings, planted land mines, carried out mass executions, and forced children to watch their parents die before being taken as soldiers. Women were raped. Prisoners were tortured. Mass graves are STILL being found. He also worked as a “teacher trainer,” helping push Barre’s hybrid ideology of Qur’anic rhetoric mixed with Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and authoritarian control into government schools. That record can’t be ignored. He raised a daughter who now sits in the U.S. Congress and advances the same collectivist, anti-capitalist instincts of redistribution and expanded state power that defined the regime he served. The ideological bloodline is clear.
— ✌🏼Honey Bomb 🌻 (@honeyybomb) October 14, 2026
The New York Post reported that Nur was a high-level officer in Barre’s military and played a key role in the Somali-Ethiopian war.
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.
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.”
Barre’s regime seized power in a 1969 coup and ruled Somalia until it collapsed in 1991. It carried out an alarming number of human rights abuses, including torture, indefinite detention, executions, and others.
It's National Security Service, also known as the “Black SS,” operated as a clandestine police force that kidnapped and arrested political dissenters.
Barre’s regime carried out its most brutal campaign in the late 1980s against the Isaaq clan in the northwest. Government forces responded to a rebellion with aerial bombardments that destroyed much of the city. The attack is known as the “Dresden of Africa.”
The regime carried out mass executions, mass burials, poisoning of wells, and placement of landmines. Estimates of the death toll ranged from 50,000 to 200,000 people, mostly civilians.
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