Members of Minnesota’s Somali community who know something about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s past are learning the hard way that speaking up can get you jumped, threatened with a coma, or told outright that you are going to be killed. A New York Post investigation published this morning details a fiercely protective network that bombards critics with online threats and physical harm in the United States, Europe, and Africa.
The group is not officially tied to Omar’s office, and it is unclear whether she directs them. What is clear is the effect. Almost no one inside the community will talk on the record.
One man who broke ranks was assaulted on the streets of Minneapolis and again outside a Kenyan restaurant in 2022. He was jumped by about fifteen people, pepper-sprayed, thrown to the ground, and left with a concussion plus cuts and bruises. He told the Post he believes a popular Somali TikTok personality set followers on him after sharing his location.
In videos the TikTokker called critics “fools,” threatened to punch one in the face if he ever returned to Minnesota, and declared that people in the community who “snitched on Ilhan Omar, as well as gone after her father” had been protected too long. “You bitches,” he added.
Other sources described daily death wishes, verbal abuse, and physical assaults simply for disagreeing with Omar. One received a chilling phone call demanding he recant prior statements and publish a message of support ahead of the midterms. Another man based in Somalia, known as Aardile, claimed in a video that people were being sent to put a critic “in hospital and in a coma.”
A separate threat told the same source “you are going to be killed” and labeled him a “snake.” The Post reviewed a seven-minute call in which a “leading member” of the local Somali community instructed a critic to say “I lied about Omar because we were arguing” and to issue a supportive statement. The source refused, saying he did not want to be further villainized, but he felt the pressure.
Omar’s office did not respond to the Post’s request for comment. She has long denied that her 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was a sham for immigration purposes. She has called the allegations “disgusting lies.” Yet the same network that issues death threats has also worked for years to label any scrutiny of her background, her policies, or her personal life as racism. Local Minnesota journalists ran into that wall as far back as her 2016 state House race.
The Secrets the Threats Are Protecting
Those secrets have been pouring out in recent weeks anyway. Federal investigators searched Omar’s Washington, D.C. home on October 12. Agents seized phones, notebooks, and other items. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin later said the case is “large” and targets multiple people. Prosecutors are examining whether Omar committed immigration fraud, including by marrying a man widely believed to be her brother so he could obtain legal status.
A 2016 Obama-era probe by the FBI and DHS found some evidence the marriage was fraudulent, but the statute of limitations had already run. A Biden-appointed U.S. attorney shut the matter down in 2021.
Sources have told the New York Post that DNA evidence is now part of the current investigation. Separate reporting has identified two additional siblings in London, Mohamed Nur Said Elmi and Leila Nur Said Elmi, whom community sources say share the same parents as Omar and Ahmed Elmi.
A family friend told the Post they acknowledge one another as brothers and sisters inside the Somali community but keep the connection quiet because of Omar’s political career. Leila’s British marriage certificate lists their father as Nur Said Elmi, a Somali military officer. Photos and social-media tributes after the father’s 2020 death listed the same children. The siblings have also appeared with Mohamed Said Hersi “Morgan,” the man accused of leading a 1988 massacre against the Isaaq clan that killed up to 200,000 civilians under Siad Barre.
Omar arrived in Minnesota as a refugee in 1995. She naturalized in 2000. She has been married three times. Her first Islamic marriage to Ahmed Hirsi produced children; she later married Elmi legally in 2009 while still connected to Hirsi, had another child during that period, filed joint taxes with Hirsi while still legally married to Elmi, and only divorced Elmi in 2017.
Sources in the community have described Elmi as “extremely feminine,” fond of short shorts and cowboy boots, and have quoted Hirsi calling the arrangement “disgusting.” Elmi has described himself as a gay man in academic writing and now works at the University of Bristol. He withdrew a green-card application after immigration officials demanded more proof of a genuine marriage.
“I feel very threatened for simply disagreeing with anything to do with Ilhan Omar. I get death wishes every day, and I am afraid to leave my home.”
That is one anonymous source speaking to the Post. The pattern is not subtle. Critics inside the community face beatings, location-sharing, and explicit threats of hospital or death. Outsiders who report the same facts are met with cries of bigotry.
Meanwhile federal agents are collecting DNA, interviewing family members, and examining citizenship paperwork that may have used false names or dates. For nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.
The protective network has kept the circle tight for years. Assaults in Minneapolis and Kenya, TikTok call-outs, and phone calls ordering recantations are not the behavior of a community that has nothing to hide. They are the tactics of people who understand that sunlight on the 2009 marriage, the London siblings, the father’s military past, and the citizenship documents is dangerous to the story Omar has told.
Whether she personally directs the threats is almost beside the point. The fear works. Most people stay silent. The ones who do not get jumped or warned that they are snakes who will be killed. That is not politics as usual. That is the enforcement of a secret by any means necessary.
