Nur Omar Mohamed, the father of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, died Monday from complications related to COVID-19.
Mohamed, 67, had been in a coma in Hennepin Medical Center for over a week. The relationship between Mohamed and Ilhan had not been well as of late especially due to her extramarital affair where he even asked her not to be there.
According to a source by the Daily Mail, Mohamed and Omar have not been speaking in recent months since DailyMail.com posted pictures of her and her new husband Tim Mynett with his hand on her rear.
‘He thought that was very demeaning that she should be walking around in public like that,’ said the source. ‘They have hardly spoken in three months.’
‘He has been very angry about the shame his daughter brought upon him and the family for having an affair while married.’
In a press release, Ilhan shared news of Nur’s death “with tremendous sadness and pain.”
“No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew him,” she said. Ilhan began the statement with a verse from the Quran that states, “Surely we belong to God and to Him shall we return.”
Nur first came to the U.S. with his family in 1995 from a refugee camp in Kenya. At the time, Ilhan was 12 years old.
In Somalia, Nur trained teachers for a living, according to a 2016 City Pages story. Upon arriving in Minneapolis, Nur first drove cabs to support his family and later found work at the post office, according to the Washington Post.
In early 2019, as Ilhan was preparing to swear into Congress for the first time, Nur wrote a guest post on her Instagram account referring to their first arrival in an airport in Washington D.C. as refugees two decades before then. In 2018, Omar became the first Somali-American elected to Congress.
“I could never have dreamed that twenty three years later I would return to the same airport with my daughter Ilhan by my side, the day before she is to be sworn in as the first Somali-American elected to the United States Congress,” Nur wrote. “You, of course, can imagine how emotional this is and why I am incredibly proud of her.”
Just months earlier senator and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren had a brother who died from the coronavirus as well. On Monday, Minnesota health officials reported 230 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19. The state’s death toll from the disease is now up to 1,304 and the total number of positive cases the state has seen so far is 30,693.
