She is widely recognized as a powerful example of a refugee triumphing against the odds—a child who escaped a war-torn land to find liberty in the United States. This is the Ilhan Omar that resonates with millions of voters.

However, a thorough investigation by the Daily Mail presents a more intricate and unsettling narrative. This story delves into the depths of a harsh African regime, notorious for its genocidal actions.

Central to this narrative is Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed.

Testimonies from former Somali military personnel, supported by archival documents and public records, suggest a different portrayal than the one Omar presents in her memoir, where she describes him as an ‘educator.’

These sources suggest he was a high-ranking officer—a colonel in the Somali National Army. He was allegedly stationed in areas where government troops later committed large-scale atrocities against civilians.

This revelation is now prompting difficult questions about the congresswoman’s history and the version of her life story she has publicly shared.

In This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, Omar portrays her father as a civilian professional, a family man caught up in a civil war that eventually forced them to flee.

The 2020 memoir downplays any ties to Somalia’s former military regime under strongman Mohamed Siad Barre.

Somali scholars and retired generals contacted by the Daily Mail paint a very different picture of the man Omar has written about.

They say Mohamed was a career soldier who rose to the rank of colonel during Barre’s rule – one of Africa’s most violent Cold War dictatorships. A regime that collapsed in bloodshed in 1991 after two decades of repression.

‘It’s becoming crystal clear that Ilhan Omar is not from any ordinary Somali family,’ Mohamed Haji Ingiriis, a Somali scholar at Oxford University and King’s College London, told the Daily Mail.

According to Ingiriis, recollections from Mohamed’s former comrades place him ‘inside the bubble of Siad Barre’s regime,’ not on its margins.

To understand the controversy, it is necessary to revisit one of the darkest chapters in modern African history.

By the late 1980s, Barre’s dictatorship was fighting for survival. Facing an armed rebellion in the north, his forces unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against the Isaaq clan in what is now self-governing Somaliland.

Human rights groups estimate that tens of thousands – possibly as many as 200,000 – of civilians were killed. Entire cities were flattened, the estimates suggest, women were raped, wells were poisoned and livestock was slaughtered. Aerial bombardments reduced neighborhoods to rubble.

General Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan, Barre’s son-in-law, oversaw the campaign. He has been repeatedly accused by international organizations of war crimes, but was never prosecuted.

Somalilanders and UN researchers today refer to the period as a genocide. And according to one military source, Omar’s father was stationed in the north under Morgan years before the killing reached its peak.

The Daily Mail spoke with several high-ranking former SNA officers who served alongside Mohamed in the 1970s and ’80s.

They requested anonymity, citing fears of reprisals in a country where political violence remains common after decades of civil war and Islamist insurgency.

One veteran general recalled encountering Mohamed in barracks and command settings across the country.

‘He was handsome, quiet, calm,’ the general told the Daily Mail. ‘His specialty was air defense.’

Crucially, the general said Mohamed was transferred to Hargeisa – the epicenter of the later atrocities – in 1984. That was three years before Barre’s forces launched the devastating crackdown now known as the ‘Hargeisa Holocaust.’

Another former general told the Daily Mail that Mohamed used a different name in Somalia – Nur Said – and that he enlisted in the army in 1966.

He said Mohamed trained in Egypt, worked in both air defense and infantry units, and served in Mogadishu and in Garbahaarrey – Barre’s southwestern hometown and a key military hub.

When Barre was finally ousted in January 1991, Mohamed was not in hiding. He was running a military school in Baidoa, southern Somalia, according to the ex-general.

That meant he remained loyal to the regime until its final collapse, even as Barre fled Mogadishu in a tank reportedly loaded with gold and foreign currency looted from the central bank.

Parts of this account align with Omar’s own telling.

In her memoir, she described fleeing Mogadishu during the chaos of 1991 and reuniting with her father on the road south, after fearing he had been killed.

From there, she wrote, the family headed to the port city of Kismayo – at the time, an epicenter of fighting between Morgan’s forces and rival militias – before escaping into neighboring Kenya some months later.

Ultimately, the family was admitted to the United States as refugees in 1995. They settled first in Virginia, then in Minneapolis, which is now home to the largest Somali community in America.

Omar rose quickly in Minnesota politics after she entered Congress in January 2019. 

Her father, who later worked as a taxi driver in the US, died from COVID-19 complications in June 2020.

But critics claim the broader context is missing from her version.

A former officer previously told the Sahan Journal that Mohamed received military training in Soviet Russia and played a ‘significant role’ in the 1977 – ’78 war against Ethiopia. The officer also claimed Mohamed served during the period of the Somaliland atrocities.

Perhaps most disturbing is grainy archival footage uncovered by Somaliland academic Hussein Bulhan.

The fifth-generation copy shows Barre’s senior military leadership openly discussing the annihilation of northern towns. One man, bearing a striking resemblance to Omar’s father, appears among the group.

In the footage, military chiefs speak of destroying entire populations.

‘Kill even the wounded. Destroy water sources and reservoirs. Burn down villages, pillage and kill their residents,’ one officer can be heard saying.

‘You must eliminate all. Allow no activity, no life. Kill all but the crows.’

There is no conclusive proof that Mohamed personally ordered or carried out atrocities. No document ties him directly to specific crimes. But critics argue that senior officers do not operate in moral isolation – especially during campaigns of mass killing.

Ingiriis, the author of The Suicidal State in Somalia, argues the issue is not guilt by association, rather it is honesty.

‘Though she was a blameless eight-year-old, these revelations suggest that Ilhan could be more forthright about her upbringing, and of the involvement of her family and clan in the brutal mass killings in the northwest in the years before the regime imploded,’ he told the Daily Mail.

Omar was born in 1982. She was a child – eight or nine years old – during the worst of the atrocities. No one suggests she bears responsibility for the crimes of a dictatorship. She may also have limited knowledge of her father’s activities back then.

Yet critics say her family’s proximity to the regime undermines her self-portrayal as a victim of it.

They also argue that her outspoken moral authority on global human rights issues invites scrutiny.

Omar has been one of Congress’s loudest voices condemning alleged abuses in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere. She has positioned herself as a conscience of the left. That, critics say, makes her family history relevant.

The Daily Mail repeatedly contacted Omar’s office for comment, but received no response.

In the past, Omar has dismissed scrutiny of her background as politically motivated misinformation. She has said she is targeted because she is a Black immigrant Muslim woman and a progressive trailblazer.

Over the years, she has grouped questions about her family history with other viral claims – including the claim that she married her brother – calling them baseless conspiracies.

She has emphasized her pride in being a refugee and the opportunities America afforded her.

The current controversy also comes as Omar defends the Somali-American community amid fallout from a massive COVID-era welfare fraud scandal, in which Somali scammers were accused of stealing more than $1 billion from US taxpayers.

She is also being quizzed about a sharp increase in the personal fortune she shares with husband Tim Mynett to as much as $30 million in 2024.

Her supporters say she is unfairly singled out, while critics say the pattern of deflection is familiar.

No evidence shows that Nur Omar Mohamed personally committed war crimes. But evidence increasingly suggests he was a trusted military professional serving a regime now widely accused of genocide.

That reality sits uneasily alongside the sanitized version presented in Omar’s memoir.

Omar cannot be held responsible for a dictatorship that collapsed when she was still a child.

But the newly surfaced accounts, archival records and historical footage raise thorny questions – not just about Somalia’s past, but about truth, transparency, and which parts of a story are left out when a political brand is built.