Still no evidence Ilhan Omar's father committed war crimes while serving in Somali military

Not long after U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, became the first Somali American and first hijab-wearing Muslim woman elected to Congress, rumors about her family's background began appearing online. Among them was a rumor that her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, committed war crimes while a colonel in the Somali National Army and was in the United States "illegally." 

Snopes previously reported on this claim in 2019, noting that Nur entered the U.S. legally, having secured asylum status, and that there was no evidence he "was responsible for, or even credibly accused of, any wrongdoing in Somalia." No new facts have come to light to change that conclusion.

Some sources — oftentimes, but not always, ones making the unfounded claim that Omar married her brother for immigration purposes — allege that Omar's father's full name was Nur Said Mohamed Elmi, and there is some evidence to support this. Snopes conducted its research using both names, but for the purposes of this article will refer to Omar's father as Nur Omar Mohamed.

Col. Nur and the 1977-78 Somali-Ethiopian War

When Nur died of COVID-19 in June 2020, the Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering immigrants and communities of color in Minneapolis, published an obituary. That article described him as an "esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army," and noted that Nur led a regiment during the 1977-78 Somali-Ethiopian War, and that his military career "ended in 1991" after rebel groups ousted the leader of Somalia, President Mohamed Siad Barre.

The Somali-Ethiopian War is also sometimes called the Ogaden War, named after a region of eastern Ethiopia whose population is ethnically Somali. The events in that war set the stage for the war crimes Nur is accused of committing.

In 1974, popular uprisings in Ethiopia led to a military coup against Emperor Haile Selassie, creating a power vacuum and a civil war that would last decades. A junta called the Derg slowly established control over the country and transformed its government into a Soviet-backed socialist regime by the late 1970s.

According to a 1990 Human Rights Watch report, Siad Barre, who had led Somalia since 1969 and was also backed by the Soviet Union, saw an opportunity. A militant group in eastern Ethiopia known as the Western Somali Liberation Front had been fighting to integrate the region into Somalia. So, in 1977, the Somali military invaded.

Faced with two of its allies fighting, the Soviets chose to maintain the status quo by moving their support from Somalia to Ethiopia. In response, Siad Barre disavowed the Soviet Union and slowly began growing Somalia's relationship with the United States.

Following the Soviet Union's decision to support Ethiopia, the Somali military quickly began to lose ground and the war ended without any territory exchanging hands. The war's failure also led to significant dissent in Somalia — in the years following, Siad Barre faced several coup attempts from anti-government rebel organizations.

Somalia's clan system

Heritage and family — in particular, the country's well-documented clan system — are important in Somali culture. It has also been the source of significant fighting over the years.

According to Ilhan Omar's memoir, "This Is What America Looks Like," her father was "an educator" who came from the "northern-based Majerteen clan," early allies in Siad Barre's regime and "one of the most powerful [clans] in the country."

Not long after the Somali-Ethiopian War, a group of Majerteen clan leaders attempted to oust Siad Barre. When the coup failed, Siad Barre began persecuting and killing Majerteen clan members, who went on to form the Somali Salvation Front (later the Somali Salvation Democratic Front), the first armed movement against his regime.

It's unknown whether Nur faced persecution after the Majeerteen coup attempt. While Ilhan Omar did write that the Majerteen were "originally subjected to Siad Barre's brutal crackdown," she also said she lived in a "guarded compound" in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. The Saban Journal obituary described her upbringing as "middle class."

With that said, the compound was not owned by her father or her father's family — it was owned by her mother's family. Omar wrote that her father, against societal norms, moved in with her mother's family when he fell in love.

As such, the compound was almost certainly owned by Ilhan Omar's maternal grandfather, who "was Benadiri, a Somali ethnic minority who trace their lineage to Persians, Indians, and Bantu peoples from West Africa and Arab Yemenis," according to the memoir. In other words, his heritage existed outside the clan structure. Her grandfather worked in the Siad Barre regime and ran "the country's network of lighthouses."

Omar also wrote that during the power vacuum following the collapse of Siad Barre's regime, family members instructed her to hide her lineage lest she be killed by militias from a rival clan.

The Issaq genocide and the fall of Siad Barre

Nur's activities between the end of the Somali-Ethiopian war in 1978 and the fall of the Siad Barre government in 1991, which is when Omar's family fled the country, are unknown, although her memoir says the family was living in the southern city of Mogadishu.

During this time period, the Somali military massacred civilians and committed genocide in the north of the country.

After the Somali-Ethiopian War, refugees from eastern Ethiopia fled to northwestern Somalia (now the autonomous region of Somaliland), the homeland of the Issaq clan. According to the 1990 report from Human Rights Watch, Siad Barre's regime worked to disenfranchise the Issaq clan in every way possible throughout the 1980s.

Siad Barre, a member of the Darod clan, began passing laws to favor the refugees, who were largely Darod themselves. Issaq business owners were told to hire Darod refugees and pay them massive salaries or be arrested. Issaq officials were removed from the government and replaced by refugees. Siad Barre conscripted thousands of refugees into militias like the Western Somali Liberation Front and trained them alongside the Somali military.

In response, members of the Issaq clan founded a different rebel group called the Somali National Movement in 1981. Siad Barre used the establishment of the SNM as justification for further escalation — within a few years, the regime treated every Issaq person as if they were helping the group and punished them accordingly. The SNM reacted to Siad Barre's escalations by fighting back. 

By 1987, the Issaq had been so fully dehumanized by the regime that Siad Barre's son-in-law, Gen. Mohamed Said Hirsi Morgan, sent a letter to Siad Barre describing plans for the "final solution" to the "Issaq problem." Arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings of Issaq people were common, and Issaq livestock and water reservoirs were being systematically destroyed by the Somali military and WSLF forces. 

In 1988, the SNM successfully captured Hargeisa and Burao, the two largest cities in Somaliland. In response, Siad Barre ordered the military to bomb the cities. According to 2018 reporting from The Nation, Hargeisa, Somalia's second-largest city, was bombed so heavily it became known as the "Dresden of Africa." The bombings, combined with ground troops, killed an estimated 40,000 people in Hargeisa.

A 1989 U.S. State Department report estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 Somalis fled to Ethiopia from northern Somalia in the following months. A U.S. General Accounting Office report to Congress from the same year described Hargeisa as a "ghost town."

In 1991, the Siad Barre regime finally collapsed. As the ongoing civil war intensified, Omar's family fled to Kenya as refugees, and the northwestern region of Somalia declared independence as the breakaway state of Somaliland. In the years following, the Center for Justice and Accountability, a legal nonprofit group that represents victims of torture and human rights abuses, successfully filed three separate lawsuits against high-ranking individuals in the Siad Barre regime living in the United States based on torture and human rights violations committed during the Issaq genocide.

No evidence links Omar's father to war crimes

There are no definitive sources detailing Nur Omar Mohamed's activities between 1978 and 1991. As such, there's no evidence proving or disproving that he participated in war crimes or genocidal acts.

The Sahan Journal's obituary concluded by mentioning that in his later years, Nur was "involved in efforts to rebuild and strengthen the security forces of Puntland, an autonomous state in northeastern Somalia." Puntland was his birthplace and the home of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, the anti-Siad Barre rebel group that later went on to establish the autonomous state.

— Snopes' archives contributed to this report.