Ilhan Omar’s Memoir Is More Evidence She Lied About Her Age

We have more evidence that Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose real name might be Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, likely lied about her age to try to obtain citizenship as a minor when her father applied for and obtained his citizenship. Omar has been under investigation for a while and federal authorities raided her D.C. area home earlier this month. They’re looking into several things, including whether or not she reportedly married her brother in an effort to help him obtain citizenship.

But the age is a big focus, as lying about it and pretending she was a minor would mean she couldn’t have obtained citizenship under her father. As our Matt Vespa reported on October 14, it looks like Omar’s congressional staff had her birth year changed from 1981 to 1982 after she was elected to Congress.

Now Omar’s own memoir backs up the reports that she was born in 1981, not 1982, and was therefore ineligible to become a citizen through her father.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar writes in her memoir, “I was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. One day everything was okay, and the next, there were bullets piercing not only buildings but also people.” While Somalia has suffered several civil wars, the chapter is… pic.twitter.com/x4UMiUrPii

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) October 26, 2026

The passage reads:

I was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. One day everything was okay, and the next, there were bullets piercing not only buildings but also people.

Bullets raining from the sky were a constant. Sometimes, though, the fighting got too loud even for us who had grown accustomed to it. During those times when the adults worried that the militia might be closing in on our neighborhood, we fled to our great grandmother’s neighborhood.

This chapter is titled “War” with a subheading of “1989-1991, Mogadishu, Somalia.” If Omar was eight in 1989, that means she was born in 1981.

That’s a major piece of evidence. Good work.

— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) October 26, 2026

Yes, it is.

Busted! Great stuff! https://t.co/g7A3YfWY67

— Marc Thiessen (@marcthiessen) October 26, 2026

It really is.

And there is not a single journalist anywhere interested in looking into these discrepancies. Her entire biography has just been “Trust me.” and that’s been good enough for all of them. https://t.co/GUTEv1mauP

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 26, 2026

Funny how that works.

And, of course, there’s the story of what her father — Nur Omar Mohamed — did in Somalia. He wasn’t a “refugee”; he was a colonel in the Somali army whose career ended in 1991 when the Barre regime was ousted and the country sank into civil war. What’s key there is from 1960 to 1991, the Somali government killed hundreds of thousands of people in Somaliland, the northeast part of the country. Most belonged to the Isaaq ethnic group. As Geraghty pointed out, everyone who worked for the Somali government in 1988 knew what was happening, with Mohamed’s rank and time in the military pointing to him having “intimate knowledge of and involvement in the planning, conception, direction, and execution of the genocide.”

If he doesn’t qualify as a refugee — and a career in the Somali military would likely disqualify him — Omar’s age is almost superfluous to the conversation, because even if she was a minor (she likely wasn’t), her father lied on the application and it’s null.

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