Who Is Ilhan Omar?

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

Much of Ilhan Omar’s family story is a black box, but we are presumably about to learn more about it.

 

Federal authorities raided her Washington, D.C., residence in what’s reportedly a probe related to her immigration paperwork.

 

The representative has alleged an effort to weaponize federal law enforcement and silence her. The Trump administration, which has repeatedly overreached in pursuit of its political opponents, doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt in such matters, although questions have swirled around Omar’s background for years.

 

She has always responded with angry dismissals, even when the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — not exactly a right-wing news source — has made inquiries.

 

The allegation that’s gotten the most attention is that Ilhan Omar married her brother.

 

The underlying suggestion is that Ilhan’s family split up in the 1990s as it sought refuge from war-torn Somalia. Allegedly, the future representative, her father, and one of her sisters used the false name Omar to come to the United States as part of another Somali family getting asylum, while her siblings — under the family’s original name — got asylum in the U.K.

 

Then, Omar supposedly got her brother into the States, too, via a sham marriage.

 

If nothing else, she’s had a very odd marital life; she’s almost the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Somali Americans. Omar was in an Islamic marriage with one man (named Ahmed Hirsi), then married the man believed to be her brother (Ahmed Said Elmi), then divorced Elmi and officially married Hirsi — before divorcing Hirsi and marrying a political consultant who is now her husband.

 

In her memoir, she says nothing of substance about Elmi. She doesn’t use his name and claims she spent very little time with him. She also doesn’t name any of her siblings. She gives the impression of wanting to provide as a little information about her background as possible and stick to the more important work of maligning her adopted country.

 

Even if Omar tried to pull off a less charming version of the Gérard Depardieu movie Green Card, the statute of limitations has run out regarding any potential fraud.

 

That means it’s possible that federal investigators are looking at the circumstances of her father’s arrival here. He, too, is outlined only vaguely in Omar’s memoir.

 

She refers to him as an educator, a strange description of a man who was, according to an admiring obituary, “an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army.”

 

The article in a publication called the Sahan Journal said that her father “joined the Somali National Army after obtaining a military education in Russia.”

 

“When he returned to Somalia,” it continues, he “began his climb in the military hierarchy, eventually becoming a colonel.” A friend told the outlet that her father led a regiment during the Somali-Ethiopian war in the late 1970s and “was one of the officers who were recognized for their work.”

 

Assuming this is correct, it makes Omar’s account very curious. Usually, relatives are proud of the military service of their family members, and are prone, if anything, to exaggerate it. Here, though, Omar apparently wants us to think he was only, say, the assistant principal of Mogadishu High.

 

If her father was a military man, it must be an embarrassment that he served the regime of Somalia’s tinpot dictator Siad Barre. There’s also the possibility that Omar is being coy because her father represented himself to U.S. immigration authorities as a teacher, rather than a Soviet-trained colonel in a blood-soaked military.

 

There’s also a question of whether Omar was too old to automatically get naturalization when her father obtained it.

 

If she’s being smeared, Omar should sit down with a neutral journalist and walk through the details of all this. It seems unlikely she’ll ever do this, though, while it’s a certainty that she’ll continue to excoriate the United States — whether it’s the country that welcomed her as a penniless refugee, or that tries to denaturalize her for alleged immigration fraud.