ILHAN OMAR’S FATHER UNDER FEDERAL PROBE FOR POSSIBLE WAR CRIMES AS COLONEL IN SOMALIA’S BRUTAL REGIME
Newsmax has the exclusive that senior U.S. officials confirm the ongoing federal investigation into Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s mysterious past is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit. Investigators are examining whether her father committed war crimes in Somalia while serving as a senior officer under dictator Siad Barre.
In his on-air report, James Rosen stated: Senior US officials have confirmed to Newsmax that they have been investigating multiple statements made by Ilhan Omar’s father during his applications for citizenship here in whether he lied about his prior military service in Somalia.
The investigation into the Congresswoman’s identity and citizenship status has intensified in recent weeks with federal investigators telling Newsmax the probe encompasses the father’s declarations as well as questions surrounding the Congresswoman’s true age and the exact nature of her relationship with her brother.
Asked on MSNBC this week whether she had ever married her brother Omar replied quote not to my knowledge. Federal officials tell Newsmax the search of the Congresswoman’s home in Washington DC earlier this month carried out by Homeland Security Investigations originated out of HSI’s human rights violators and war crimes unit.
Rosen described Omar’s father, Noor Omar Mohammed, as a senior officer in the Somalia National Army and a veteran of the country’s war with neighboring Ethiopia in the late 1970s. He came to the US as a refugee in 1995 listing himself as an educator.
His daughter became a citizen in 2000. Historians and former officers have confirmed he was a full colonel loyal to the Barre regime until its collapse in 1991. That regime carried out the Isaaq campaign, with estimates of 50,000 to 200,000 civilian deaths later classified by a UN investigation as genocide. One former comrade told the New York Post that people were scared of him and looked away when he walked past in uniform.
The family fled only after the dictatorship fell. Experts say he misrepresented himself as a refugee when his military service under a regime responsible for mass slaughter should have barred him under the persecutor exclusion.
This case raises the core question of how a colonel from that army entered America as a refugee and how his daughter’s derivative citizenship was secured amid longstanding questions about her age and family relationships.
Sources: James Rosen reporting for Newsmax, New York Post interviews with historians and former Somali officers, Sahan Journal obituary, National Legal and Policy Center analysis.