Explore Ilhan Omar’s tangled family web in our interactive graphic: The mysterious ‘colonel’ dad, ‘brother’ husband and the probe that won’t die

Ilhan Omar’s tangled family history is at the center of a federal criminal probe after Homeland Security agents raided her Washington DC home last week.

Investigators are focused on her late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, and whether he lied or omitted information on immigration forms, the New York Times reported.

Omar says she became a citizen in 2000 at 17 through her father, a route closed to anyone 18 or over. Her staff had her birth year changed from 1981 to 1982 on her Minnesota legislature biography in May 2019, the New York Post reported.

Agents seized her phone and passport in the October 12 raid on the northeast Washington home she shares with husband Tim Mynett. Grand jury subpoenas have gone to her sister Sahra Noor and at least one other person in her family circle.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has probed Omar’s immigration status. Homeland Security Investigations – an investigative arm under ICE – examined Omar in 2019 and found ‘insufficient evidence of wrongdoing,’ a former official told the Washington Post. 

The new probe has also revived claims that her 2009 marriage to British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was to her brother. ‘We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States,’ Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on a podcast in September. No evidence for that claim has been made public.

Omar, who denies wrongdoing and has not been charged, calls the claim about her marriage ‘absurd and offensive’ and the raid ‘an attempt to target political enemies.’ 

Here the Daily Mail unpicks Omar’s tangled family tree, from the ‘colonel’ father at the heart of the probe to the husband accused of being her brother and the political consultant she wed in 2020…

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THE ‘COLONEL’ FATHER

Nur Omar Mohamed brought his family to America in 1995 after four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, settling first in the Washington suburbs and then in Minneapolis.

He drove a taxi and later worked for the US Postal Service, and Omar has described him as an educator.

‘Ilhan’s father was never an educator,’ Somali historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told the New York Post, describing him as ‘a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime.’

Ingiriis claims Nur ‘misrepresented himself as a refugee’ to US authorities, having stayed loyal to the dictatorship until it collapsed in 1991.

His immigration paperwork is now at the heart of the federal probe, because Omar says she obtained her citizenship through his naturalization.

Nur died of Covid complications in June 2020 at the age of 67. ‘No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew and loved him,’ Omar wrote at the time.

Omar’s mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, died when Ilhan was two, and her father and grandfather raised her as the youngest of seven children. Omar has said little publicly about her other siblings.

THE SECOND HUSBAND AND ALLEGED BROTHER

Omar married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen, in February 2009, when records gave their ages as 26 and 23.

The couple filed their marriage license application in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and despite both being Muslim, their ceremony was conducted by a Christian minister, Wilecia Harris.

‘If they had gone to an imam he would have almost certainly have known if they were related,’ one Somali leader in Minnesota told the Daily Mail.

Abdihakim Osman Nur, a Minneapolis community leader, told the Daily Mail in 2020 that Omar and Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children, had introduced Elmi to him as her brother.

‘She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school,’ Nur said. ‘We all thought she was just getting papers together to allow him to stay in this country.’

Elmi enrolled at North Dakota State University, Omar’s alma mater, in 2010, and university officials told the Daily Mail he was still there in 2012, a year after Omar says they split.

The couple divorced in 2017. Omar has called the suggestion that Elmi is her brother ‘absurd and offensive,’ and her 2020 memoir described him as a man ‘whom I spent so little time with that I wouldn’t even make him a footnote in my story.’

Elmi has since returned to London, the Daily Mail has reported, and has not responded to past requests for comment.

THE BABY DADDY (AKA ‘SOUTHSIDE’)

Ahmed Hirsi, known as ‘Southside’, is the father of Omar’s three children. They wed in a 2002 religious ceremony, but it was not a legal marriage.

The pair split in 2008, but Omar says they reconciled in 2011 while she was still legally married to Elmi, and their third child followed a year later.

She filed joint federal tax returns with Hirsi in 2014 and 2015 while still legally married to Elmi, according to a 2019 report by Minnesota’s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.

Omar and Hirsi finally married legally in January 2018, a month after her divorce from Elmi, but the marriage lasted less than two years.

The marriage effectively ended when Hirsi visited Omar’s Washington apartment and found her lounging around in pajamas with Tim Mynett, the Daily Mail reported.

They divorced in November 2019, and Hirsi remarried in Mogadishu just 37 days later.

THE MILLIONAIRE CURRENT HUSBAND

Tim Mynett, a Democratic political consultant who converted to Islam, married Omar in March 2020.

The Daily Mail revealed their relationship in 2019, after the pair were spotted dining at an Italian restaurant in Playa Del Rey, California, while both were married to other people.

His then-wife, Beth Mynett, filed for divorce that August, citing his ‘devastating and shocking declaration of love’ for Omar.

Omar’s campaign went on to pay his firm, E Street Group, more than $2.8 million over the 2019-20 election cycle, federal filings show.

Mynett later co-founded venture capital firm Rose Lake Capital. Omar’s original disclosure covering 2024 valued his stake at between $5 million and $25 million, compared with $1-$1,000 the previous year.

The reported value of his stake in winery eStCru rose from between $15,000 and $50,000 to between $1 million and $5 million over the same period.

Omar later amended the filing to give both interests no net value, with her office blaming an accounting error involving ownership shares and liabilities.

Omar’s office said in September that the Office of Congressional Conduct had voted to dismiss misconduct allegations over the filings. Pirro’s office is conducting a separate criminal investigation into the valuations.

Mynett defended his wife outside their home last week, telling Fox News: ‘My wife came here when she was 12 years old as a child war refugee.’

THE AUTHOR SISTER

Sahra Noor, Omar’s older sister, was among those who received grand jury subpoenas last week, the New York Times reported.

Noor, who holds degrees in nursing and health systems administration, now runs a consulting firm that says it has secured ‘more than $20 million in funding for health initiatives.’

Her memoir, Salt in the Snow, came out in August and explores migration, belonging and the influence of her father.

Receiving a grand jury subpoena does not mean Noor is suspected of a crime, and she has not been charged.

THE CHILDREN

Adnan Hirsi, 20, is Omar’s only son. Minneapolis police searched the apartment he shares with Abdulrahman Abdi, 22, on August 25, seizing guns and ammunition belonging to Abdi, Fox News reported.

Abdi, a convicted felon, faces a weapons charge, but Adnan is not accused of any wrongdoing.

Omar, who supports red flag laws and has voted for an assault weapons ban, did not answer a reporter’s questions on Capitol Hill in September after police searched her son’s apartment.

Isra Hirsi, 23, is the eldest and co-founded the US Youth Climate Strike as a teenager, landing on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list in 2020. Ilwad, the youngest, was born in 2012.