Bombshell: Ilhan Omar Did Marry Her Brother, Says Personal Friend Who Has Finally Gone on Record

We should have known it was coming. Not because of the facts, mind you, but because it feels like ages — years, really — since we’ve had a good Rep. Ilhan Omar scandal.

The last one I specifically remember that didn’t involve the Minnesota Democrat saying something anti-Semitic (which basically involves every time she opens her mouth on foreign affairs) involved the amount of money her campaign was funneling to the man who became her husband — and that feels about at least 40 Scaramuccis ago. It’s time for something fresh.

And lo and behold, we’ve got something fresh — albeit about an old scandal, but one which the Democrats insisted was disinformation and lies.

According to a report in the U.K. Daily Mail, sources confirm Omar told friends that her “second husband” was actually her brother and that the marriage was a scam to get him immigration papers.

Furthermore, one of these friends told the outlet that the relationship was a major scandal in Minneapolis’ Somali community when it happened, long before Omar became a major political figure.

Omar has long denied the marriage was a scam or that the two were related, and political media have called conservatives who brought attention to the unusual arrangement conspiracy theorists, bigots, or both.

However, Abdihakim Osman — a friend of Omar’s first/third husband (this is complicated stuff, so bear with us) — says that it was well-known that the relationship was a scam.

Furthermore, he said that the marriage was conducted through a Christian minister even though both Omar and Ahmed Elmi are Muslim, because he suspects imams in the Minneapolis area would have known the two were related and refused to wed them.

What we know is that Omar married her first husband, Ahmed Hirsi, in a 2002 Muslim ceremony. However, as the Daily Mail points out, “like many in the immigrant community, [it]was not registered with the state.”

Osman met Hirsi when Omar’s first husband was working at a barbershop, then later worked for him when he opened a hookah business.

The couple had two children before Ahmed Elmi appeared in the Minneapolis Somali community. He told the Daily Mail that Elmi, who presented himself as effeminate, was sent from the U.K. to Minneapolis for “rehab,” although one gets the impression this did not involve substance abuse.

“People began noticing that Ilhan and [Hirsi] were often with a very effeminate young guy,” Osman said. “He was very feminine in the way he dressed — he would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very, short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him.

“[Hirsi] and Ilhan both told me it was Ilhan’s brother and he had been living in London but he was mixing with what were seen as bad influences that the family did not like,” he continued. “So they sent him to Minneapolis as ‘rehab.’”

• Omar’s former friend, Ahmed Abdihakim Osman is the first person to go on record to speak of how Omar said she wanted to get her brother papers so he could stay in the United States, at a time when she was married to her first husband Ahmed Hirsi. pic.twitter.com/uzYmRDnxzB

— Dom $Lucre Memecoin (@dom_lucre) February 1, 2023

Osman also compared the two weddings: “When [Hirsi] and Ilhan got married, a lot of people were invited. It was a big Islamic wedding uniting two large clans in the Minneapolis community,” he said. “I would say there were 100-150 people there.”

But: “When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it.”

“No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,” he said

In fact, the scandal was originally centered more among Hirsi, who was well-known in Minneapolis’ large Somali community.

“He was a footballer, he promoted a lot of Somali shows, he was very popular,” Osman said. “So the scandal was about [Hirsi’s] brother-in-law more than Ilhan’s brother.”

And while the rumors were that Omar and Elmi were brother and sister, because there was a lack of paperwork from their native Somalia — which had been devastated by war — there was no way to prove it.

At the time of their 2009 marriage, Omar said she had separated from Hirsi in 2008 — and since the marriage wasn’t legally recognized, it wasn’t an impediment anyway.

However, a Somali diaspora website called Somalispot first reported the rumors back in 2016, when Omar’s political career was in the ascendency: “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him he started university at her alma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012,” a report on the website read.

“Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom.”

Omar called these “baseless, absurd rumors” — something Osman said was baseless and absurd, based on what she allegedly told him.

“She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school. We all thought she was just getting papers together to allow him to stay in this country,” he said. “Once she had the papers they could apply for student loans. They both moved to North Dakota to go to school but she was still married to [Hirsi]. In the Somali way, the only marriage that mattered was the one in the mosque.

“Ilhan came back to Minneapolis all the time to see her family, but her brother didn’t come with her,” he added.

Omar divorced Elmi in 2017 and “remarried” Hirsi in 2018. This time it was a legal civil ceremony — but the reason “remarried” is in quotation marks is the fact that the couple had a child while she was still legally married to Elmi.

“They never parted,” Osman said.

Hirsi and Omar divorced after she was discovered to be having an affair with her chief fundraiser, Tim Mynett. The two are now married, and Hirsi has remarried as well.

While the marriage controversy had mostly died down, it was reported last month that the FBI had met with a source who had a “a trove of documents” related to Omar and Elmi’s marriage. It’s unclear whether the source was or connected to Osman, but marriage fraud can carry up to five years in jail and $250,000 in fines.

And this time around, it appears Omar can’t hide behind talk of conspiracy theories or Islamophobia anymore — not with voices in her hometown Somali community speaking out. It’s just one voice, true, but a well-connected one, and perhaps the first of many willing to unravel this very strange (and possibly illegal) arrangement.

Curious how a congresswoman who rants about Israelis and perfidies of America stands reasonably accused of marrying her brother to get him over to the country — and has never been able to offer proof, despite the accusation being around for years, that it’s false.

Not only is there an irony in committing a crime to get a relative over to a country you hate, allegedly, but how often do you hear about Israelis doing this? Just a thought to chew on.

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