Another key controversy surrounding Ilhan Omar involves her marriage the Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, believed to also be her brother.
To understand the allegations surrounding Ilhan Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, one must first understand Somali naming conventions. In Somali culture, names follow a patronymic chain: a person’s middle name is their father’s first name, and their last name is their paternal grandfather’s first name. So “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi” means Ilhan, daughter of Nur Said, granddaughter of Elmi. “Ahmed Nur Said Elmi” means Ahmed, son of Nur Said, grandson of Elmi. If both carry the same patronymic chain — Nur Said Elmi — they share the same father: a man named Nur Said, son of Elmi. The naming convention alone establishes a putative family connection between Ilhan and Ahmed. It does not by itself establish that their shared “Nur Said” is the same man as Nur Omar Mohamed of Minneapolis — that requires a second step. But it is the foundation on which the entire family structure rests.
The link between the UK Elmis’ “Nur Said” and Minneapolis’s Nur Omar Mohamed rests on several converging pieces of evidence. First, Leila Nur Said Elmi’s 1997 London marriage certificate — a primary document obtained by the New York Post — lists her father as “Nur Said Elmi, military officer.” Second, the father maintained a Facebook page under the name “Nur Said” while living in Minneapolis as Nur Omar Mohamed — and Leila publicly interacted with that page, linking her directly to the Minneapolis man. Third, when Nur Omar Mohamed died in June 2020, community condolences on social media were addressed to both Ilhan in Minneapolis and Leila in London as bereaved daughters — the community that knew him treated them as siblings mourning the same father. Fourth, Ilhan Omar’s own deleted 2013 Father’s Day post referred to her father using the name “Nur Said” — the same name carried in the UK Elmis’ patronymic chain. Taken together, these four pieces of evidence — a primary document, social media interaction, community testimony, and Ilhan’s own words — establish with reasonable confidence that the “Nur Said” in the UK Elmis’ names is the same man who lived in Minneapolis as Nur Omar Mohamed. Leila, Ahmed, and Mohamed Nur Said Elmi are, on this evidence, Ilhan Omar’s siblings.
How Leila, Mohamed, and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi came to be in the United Kingdom is not documented in any public record. Their father and younger sisters spent years in the Dadaab refugee camp before entering the US in 1995; of the UK branch, we know only that they established themselves in Britain under the Elmi name. By 1997, Leila was sufficiently settled in London’s Camden district to marry there, suggesting she had been in the country for at least a year or two before that. Mohamed remains the least documented of the siblings — named in investigative reporting but without a confirmed address, career, or public record.
Ahmed, the third UK sibling, is reasonably well documented. UK Companies House records list him as a director of a now-dissolved company and record his birth as April 1985 and his nationality as British. Address records documented by independent investigator David Steinberg place him in the same London neighborhood as Leila. Social media and family photographs show that the two branches remained in contact across two continents. It is Ahmed — believed to be the youngest of the UK siblings, raised by Leila in London, brought to Minneapolis under circumstances that remain disputed — who sits at the center of the second major controversy surrounding Ilhan Omar.
According to Abdihakim Osman, a Minneapolis Somali blogger who knew Omar and Hirsi and who spoke to the Daily Mail in 2020, Ahmed’s family sent him to Minneapolis as a form of “rehab” after he fell in with what they regarded as bad influences in London. As a British citizen, Ahmed would have needed no visa to enter the US. He arrived in Minneapolis sometime before February 2009. On February 12, 2009, he and Ilhan Omar were legally married in Hennepin County, Minnesota. He subsequently attended North Dakota State University, reportedly from 2010 to 2012, before returning to the United Kingdom.
On its face, this is the record of an ordinary marriage. The allegation is that it was nothing of the sort: that Ilhan Omar married her brother, and did so to defraud US immigration authorities. The case rests on two separate but related questions — the biological relationship and the fraudulent purpose — and the evidence for each is distinct.
On the question of biological relationship, the circumstantial case is substantial. Ilhan and Ahmed share an identical patronymic chain — Nur Said Elmi — indicating the same father. Osman told the Daily Mail that both Omar and Hirsi had told him Ahmed was Omar’s brother, and that no one in the community knew a wedding had taken place until the marriage certificate surfaced years later. Screenshots published by David Steinberg reportedly showed Ahmed on Instagram holding Omar’s newborn daughter and calling her his niece; the account has since been deleted, and the screenshots could not be independently verified. No prior romantic relationship between the two has been documented.
Further, Ahmed Elmi is gay. In a 2026 academic paper attributed to him, he wrote: “As a gay man of the East African diaspora, my fieldwork was never neutral.” His doctoral research at the University of Bristol examines queer resistance to violence and criminalization in Kenya. His sexuality is not concealed; it informs his academic work.
We cannot state definitively that Ahmed was openly gay in 2009 when he married Ilhan. What we can say is that a man who has since publicly identified as gay marrying a woman in Minneapolis in 2009 for reasons of romantic love is, to put it mildly, an unusual proposition. The balance of evidence is compelling: Ilhan married Ahmed for reasons other than romantic interest or purposes of starting a family.
Further evidence that the Elmi marriage was a sham comes from Ilhan Omar’s concurrent relationship with Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi. Ilhan and Hirsi had entered into a religious marriage — a nikah — in 2002, years before the Elmi marriage, and had two children together. Throughout the entire period of her legal marriage to Elmi — from February 2009 to December 2017 — Ilhan appears to have lived with Hirsi as her partner. Address records compiled by Steinberg place all three — Omar, Elmi, and Hirsi — at the same Fargo, North Dakota address in August 2009, six months after the marriage. While still legally married to Elmi, she had a third child with Hirsi. In 2014 and 2015, also while legally married to Elmi, she and Hirsi filed joint federal tax returns — a filing status available only to legally married couples. The Minnesota Campaign Finance Board, which uncovered the issue during a separate investigation, said the returns needed to be corrected and ordered her to repay campaign funds spent on them and to pay a penalty. She legally married Hirsi in January 2018, one month after the Elmi divorce was finalized. The available evidence suggests that throughout the eight years of her legal marriage to Ahmed Elmi, Ilhan Omar was in every practical, domestic, and financial sense the partner of Ahmed Hirsi, not Ahmed Elmi.
Ilhan Omar has consistently denied the allegations of marrying her brother. In 2016 she described them as “disgusting” and “absurd.” In her 2017 legal divorce filing, she swore under oath that she had had no contact with Ahmed since June 2011 and did not know how to reach him. That sworn statement sits uneasily alongside several documented facts. First, Ahmed reportedly remained enrolled at NDSU until 2012 — after she says contact ended. Second, Steinberg found Ahmed’s name and Instagram username, @ahmednelmi, embedded in the code of the website for Sahra Noor’s company, Grit Partners — evidence, corroborated by the Daily Caller News Foundation, that he helped set up the company’s online presence in January 2019, nearly eight years after Ilhan swore she had lost touch with him. Third, Omar swore she did not know how to reach Ahmed. He maintains a publicly listed institutional profile with his email address at the University of Bristol, as well as active LinkedIn and Substack pages — findable by anyone with internet access in under a minute. By no means is he lost or inaccessible. He is an academic with a necessary public presence. Omar’s statements regarding Ahmed are not supported by the facts.
The immigration fraud case rests not only on the nature of the marriage but on what followed it. Ahmed received a conditional, marriage-based green card. Under standard USCIS rules, the conditions must be removed around the second anniversary of the green card — roughly 2011, the same year Ilhan says the relationship ended. The coincidence of dates is convenient: by claiming the relationship ended in 2011, Ilhan had a ready explanation for why no joint petition to remove the conditions was filed. Ahmed left the US in 2012, having obtained what the marriage provided: residence in the United States and a US college education.
The 2011 date was first established publicly in a written statement Omar issued in August 2016, when the brother allegations surfaced during her Minnesota legislative campaign. At the same time, she was paying immigration lawyers with campaign funds. According to records from the Campaign Finance Board’s investigation, those lawyers filed Freedom of Information Act requests with USCIS, and their timesheets reference the I-130 and I-751 — the forms tied to obtaining a marriage-based green card and making it permanent. The board ordered the improperly spent campaign funds repaid. The simultaneous public establishment of the 2011 separation date and the legal examination of the underlying immigration documents is circumstantially damning: it suggests not a casual biographical clarification but a coordinated legal strategy.
Ahmed did at some point apply to make his green card permanent. According to the Washington Post, USCIS requested additional evidence because of concerns about the validity of the marriage, and Ahmed withdrew the application rather than provide it — again consistent with a sham marriage.
What remains missing is the definitive proof: DNA. If Ilhan Omar wants to clear the air and disprove the accusations against her, all she needs is a DNA sample along with one from Ahmed. He’s not hard to find: he maintains a public academic profile, with his email address listed, at the University of Bristol. With her career, her citizenship and possibly her liberty at stake, a single email would seem a small price to pay. That Omar has not made it speaks for itself. On the evidence, Ilhan Omar married her brother.
A note on sourcing: This piece draws on Hennepin County marriage records; UK Companies House records; a certified UK marriage certificate obtained by the New York Post; open-source investigative research by David Steinberg, including address records and website code corroborated by the Daily Caller News Foundation; on-record testimony from Abdihakim Osman reported by the Daily Mail; Minnesota Campaign Finance Board findings and investigation records; reporting by the Washington Post on USCIS records; the University of Bristol’s public researcher profile; and Ilhan Omar’s own public statements. The investigation is ongoing and further documentation may emerge.