Exclusive | Ilhan Omars father was loyal to Somali dictator, misrepresented himself as a refugee: Source

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 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...