Historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis says Rep. Ilhan Omar’s father was a colonel loyal to Somali dictator Siad Barre who misrepresented himself as a refugee, not an educator.
Federal agents raided the Minnesota congresswoman’s home on Monday as part of an ongoing criminal fraud investigation, even as fresh questions surfaced about how her late father entered the United States.
The Post reported that a source said Nur Omar Mohamed “wasn’t who he purported to be.” Oxford researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told the outlet Nur misrepresented himself as a refugee and served as a prominent military commander under Siad Barre rather than the civilian educator his daughter has long described.
Omar has portrayed her father as a teacher who fled civil war. Her 2020 memoir framed that civilian path. Ingiriis rejects the account outright.
Nur Omar Mohamed, also known as Nur Said, was born in the coastal town of Bandarbeyla in what is now Puntland. The family escaped via Kenya and arrived in America as refugees in 1995. They settled in Minneapolis. Nur later drove a taxi and worked for the postal service. He died in June 2020 at age 67 from COVID-19 complications.
Rep. Ilhan Omar has repeatedly called him an “educator.” That public story fits a familiar refugee narrative. It does not match the military career Ingiriis and a former comrade describe.
Family legal trouble is not new in this circle. Minneapolis police previously raided the home of Omar’s son and seized guns and ammunition.
Ingiriis, a historian and Oxford doctoral researcher, gave The Post a detailed counter-history. He said Nur joined Somalia’s military in the late 1960s. Conflicting accounts place his training in the Soviet Union or Egypt. Siad Barre seized power in a Soviet-backed coup in 1969. Nur climbed the ranks with postings in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, and Garbahaarrey, Barre’s hometown and a key base.
Ingiriis was blunt about rank and role.
Historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told The Post:
“He was a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime,”
He added a direct rejection of the educator story.
Ingiriis said:
“Ilhan’s father was never an educator.”
Yusuf Ismail Faraton, a former army officer who served with Nur and also moved to Minneapolis, supplied more operational detail through the reporting. Faraton described Nur leading multiple military brigades, becoming a regiment commander, and playing a significant role in the Somali-Ethiopian war from July 1977 to March 1978.
After the dictatorship fell in 1991, Ingiriis said, Nur ran the Daynuunaay military school. Loyalty, in this telling, outlasted the regime’s collapse.
Ingiriis tied Nur’s departure to the end of Barre’s rule, not earlier persecution.
Ingiriis told reporters:
“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.”
He continued:
“He only fled when the dictatorship fell in 1991,”
And:
“He was the beneficiary of the military regime and should not have been given asylum whatsoever.”
Ingiriis said Nur assisted the dictator in remaining in power and was protecting his career and colonel’s position. Barre’s government is tied in the historical record to mass violence, including a campaign against the Isaaq clan in the north that flattened cities, poisoned wells, and laid more than a million landmines. As many as 200,000 people were killed across the dictatorship’s two decades of oppression. Millions fled the later civil war.
Ingiriis framed the human cost for those who lived under the regime.
He 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.”
He also said he believes it is “very wrong for the United States to host war criminals.” That label is his. The reporting does not present a U.S. court finding that applied it to Nur.
U.S. immigration law draws a hard line. It 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. The Justice Department materials cited in the reporting track that bar.
If Nur held the rank and loyalties Ingiriis describes, the educator-refugee story collides with that statute. The Post piece notes missing immigration records connected to the family history. No primary asylum application text, roster, or adjudication appears in the available reporting to close the file one way or the other.
Minnesota has faced repeated fraud headaches that drain public trust. The state has scrambled for proof while Medicaid funds faced a freeze over fraud concerns.
Hennepin County, home to the Minneapolis metro where the Omar family settled, has seen its own breakdowns. Officials there shut down a $2 million ICE relief fund after fraud swallowed most claims.
The Monday raid on Omar’s home sits inside an ongoing criminal fraud investigation. The reporting does not spell out charges, a docket, or a direct evidentiary bridge from Nur’s 1990s entry file to the agents at the door. It does place the search against a backdrop of unanswered questions about how the family story was vetted.
Statewide politics already carry a heavy fraud cloud. A multibillion-dollar fraud scandal has shadowed Minnesota Democratic races at the highest levels.
Immigration enforcement fights add another layer in the same state. A Trump-appointed judge recently sided with Minnesota and dismissed a DOJ lawsuit over sanctuary policy.
Nur’s recorded work in Minneapolis was ordinary, taxi shifts and postal routes. The dispute is not about those later jobs. It is about whether a senior officer from a dictatorship that killed on a mass scale walked into the U.S. refugee system on a false civilian biography, and whether anyone in authority ever checked.
Open files remain. Absolute dates for the raid beyond “Monday,” the precise fraud case agents are building, and any surviving primary immigration paperwork on Nur are not laid out in full. Omar’s office is not quoted responding to Ingiriis in the reporting. Faraton’s brigade claims arrive without published contemporaneous orders or rosters in the same package.
Refugee status is a legal privilege with bright-line exclusions for persecutors. When a congresswoman’s origin story rests on an “educator” who fled terror, and a credentialed Somali historian says the man was a loyal colonel who left only after his patron fell, voters get to demand the records, not another polished memoir chapter.