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Ilhan Omar Deletes 2013 Post That Revealed Her Father’s Name

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Luke Rosiak Investigative Reporter
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  • During the early morning hours Tuesday, Rep. Ilhan Omar deleted a 2013 tweet saying that Nur Said is her father.
  • Omar was married to a man named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who may be her own brother. In Somalia, one’s name is normally a first name, the father’s name, and then the grandfather’s name.
  • Other family members have also tried to scrub social media evidence.

Rep. Ilhan Omar early Tuesday morning deleted a 2013 post that said her father’s name is Nur Said.

“Happy Father’s Day to my aabo Nur Said, I am forever grateful to Allah for giving me the best father a…” the Minnesota Democrat said in the June 2013 post.

Omar’s spokesman, Jeremy Slevin, did not answer questions from the Daily Caller News Foundation about why a congresswoman would try to erase the identity of her father from the internet. But the name of the man who Omar married under unusual circumstances was Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, adding to evidence that she married her brother.

At 8pm on Monday, Shaikh Tawhidi, the “Imam of Peace,” tweeted a link to the tweet. The DCNF observed the live tweet and took a screenshot at that time.

Soon after, One America News journalist Jack Posobiec called attention to the tweet and archived it here.

By Tuesday morning, the six-year-old tweet had disappeared.

The Father’s Day tweet links to an Instagram post that had previously been deleted, which likely would have finished the sentence in the tweet.

In 2016, Power Line’s Scott Johnson, PJMedia’s David Steinberg and Alpha News’ Preya Samsundar
published Instagram and Facebook screenshots suggesting that Omar married her brother. But the Instagram posts are now deleted, leading the media to treat the screenshots with caution.

The Minnesota Star-Tribune reported in June that Elmi was “possibly her own brother,” but noted that it was unable to obtain the original social media posts shared by Power Line and Alpha News.

Omar says she married a different man, Ahmed Hirsi, under a religious, but non-legal ceremony in 2002 and had two children, then separated from him and married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, the Tribune reported. But in 2012, she had another child that she says was Hirsi’s and in 2014 and 2015, filed her taxes jointly with him — all while legally married to Elmi.

Meanwhile, addresses listed in dozens of traffic violations and other publicly available government documents first uncovered by the Washington Examiner show that Omar was living with Hirsi the entire time.

One Instagram screenshot saved by Power Line shows that one day after Omar’s daughter was born in 2012, Elmi posted to a picture to his Instagram account of him holding a baby with the caption “Nieces, fresh out the vagina!”

Ilhan Omar's brother / Powerline blog

Ahmed Nur Said Elmir. (Screenshot/Power Line)

In 2017, she filed for divorce from Elmi and said she hadn’t seen him since 2012. She swore under oath that she did not know the name of a single member of his family and did not know anyone who knew him. But another Power Line screenshot of a deleted post from Omar’s Instagram account shows her with Elmi in London during this period. (RELATED: Judicial Watch Files Congressional Ethics Complaint Against Ilhan Omar For Possible Perjury, Immigration Fraud)

Ilhan Omar and her brother / Powerline blog

Ilhan Omar and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. (Screenshot/Power Line)

Other family members have scrubbed their online profiles to hide the relationship between Omar and people with the last name Nur Said Elmi.

Additionally, in December 2016, a man named Suleiman Axoow wrote on Facebook: “On Wednesday night I had an opportunity to have dinner with State Representative-Elect Ilhan Omar & her lovely sis Leila Elmi.”

Leila’s 1997 marriage certificate shows that she lived in Camden, a neighborhood of London, and was 24 years old that year. It shows that her father‘s name was Nur Said Elmi. Omar’s ex-husband Elmi’s Facebook page, which the DCNF archived on June 23, shows that he was attending the Haverstock School as a 12-year-old in the same neighborhood during that time period. The profile was deleted after the DCNF linked to it in a previous story.

Leila Elmi marriage certificate / London records via David Steinberg

Leila Elmi marriage certificate / London records via David Steinberg

The one person who Omar has publicly recognized as her sibling in America is Sahra Noor, who ran a high-profile nonprofit in Minnesota. Sahra has identified Nur Said as her father, according to screenshots published in 2016 by Preya Samsundar.

In January 2019, Noor moved to Nairobi, Kenya, to start a company called Grit Partners International. Ahmed Elmi, who works in digital marketing, manages her Instagram account. On Instagram’s mobile app, if you click “email” on Grit Partners Internation’s page, it drafts an email to him.

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