It seems everyone knew Ilhan Omar married Elmi, who they were later told was her brother. That is according to the head of the local Somali community who has gone on the record.
Abdihakim Osman is the first to admit this on the record, the tabloid Daily Mail reports.
Ilhan Omar said she would do anything to get papers for Elmi. People didn’t realize that meant she would marry him to get papers for him, Osman said.
She told friends years ago that she would do what she had to do to get her brother an education, and Mr. Osman was one of those friends who was told in confidence.
It is difficult to get proof of their familial relationship since war-torn Somalia doesn’t have a lot of records.
PAPERS FOR HER BROTHER
Osman said, “She needed to get papers for her brother to go to school. We all thought she was just getting papers to allow him to stay in this country.” [her brother Elmi is in Britain]
She married Elmi in 2009 in a ceremony conducted by a Christian minister. It is suspected that she was married to her first husband, who is her third husband, at the time she married her brother.
Rep. Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002 in a Muslim ceremony, but they split in 2008. While she was legally married to Elmi, she had another child with Hirsi.
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In 2009, Elmi and Omar moved to Fargo and they both attended university in North Dakota.
EVERYONE KNEW SHE MARRIED HIRSI
When Hirsi married Ilhan, there were a lot of people in attendance. It was a big Islamic wedding of two clans. Omar has often said they weren’t married and it was nothing but a commitment ceremony in the Islamic tradition.
Mr. Osman said, “When [Hirsi] married Elmi, no one even knew about it…No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the certificate years later.”
Omar has always said the rumors were “absurd and baseless,” and she routinely accuses doubters of Islamophobia. But the proof keeps piling up
HIRSI AND OMAR WERE ALWAYS WITH THIS EFFEMINATE GUY
“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 short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him. [Hirsi] and Ilhan told me it was Ilhan’s brother.”
The first report that Omar and her husband were siblings appeared on the website Somalispot in 2016. It said of Elmi, 34: “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him he started university at her alma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012.”
“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.”
IT’S FINALLY INVESTIGATED
The New York Post reported last month that the FBI was investigating the marriage and had met with a source in Minneapolis who handed over ‘a trove of documents’ related to the marriage.
Any findings were to be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Education, the paper reported. Anyone found guilty of committing marriage fraud faces up to five years in jail and a fine of up to $250,000.
Elmi and Omar married on February 12, 2009, at a Hennepin County office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, southwest of Minneapolis, their marriage license shows. Omar said she and Hirsi had separated in 2008, and because their faith-based union was never recognized by law, neither is their separation.
Osman believes Omar and Elmi married in the Christian faith because an imam would have known they were related and would have refused to marry them.
Omar and Elmi eventually divorced in 2017 and she remarried Hirsi — with whom she had a third child — in a civil ceremony the following year, just in time for her election to Congress.
Hirsi is curently remarried to a nurse and she has a boyfriend who is about to be divorced.
