Politics

Ilhan Omar’s Ex-Husband and Alleged Brother Describes Himself As ‘Gay Man’ In ‘Woke Slop’ Research Paper

Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s ex-husband Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — whom President Donald Trump accuses of being her brother — described himself as a “gay man” in an August 2026 academic paper.

Elmi, a University of Bristol doctoral researcher, wrote that studying violence against gay individuals in Africa was “not just an academic undertaking” due to “the complexities of [his] identity” as a “gay man of the East African diaspora.”

Tabloids have over the years described Elmi’s colorful social media posts and described him as “flamboyant.” The 2026 paper provides the first explicit evidence of his sexual orientation.

The paper consists of his reflections on interviewing research subjects in Kenya. The text is laden with academic phrases like “standpoint theory” and “fluid insider-outsider positioning.”

“It has all the features of woke slop: Not methodologically serious, ideologically slanted, and more concerned with academic ornamentation than clear communication,” Ian Kingsbury, senior director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine at Do No Harm, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The fact that it’s so tedious and painful to read signals that it isn’t meant for an audience outside a small clique of sociologists or gender theorists.”

Department of Homeland Security authorities raided Omar’s Washington, DC, home on Oct. 12. The investigation reportedly involves immigration fraud and originated in the war crimes unit, suggesting the probe may examine the legitimacy of her naturalization through her father, a Somali military official. But the investigation is also examining evidence pointing to a sham marriage with Elmi, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Elmi and Omar’s congressional office did not respond to requests for comment.

The discovery of his sexual orientation adds to the list of peculiarities about Omar’s first marriage.

In an interview with MS NOW she called the accusation she married her brother “insane” but stopped short of giving a flat-out denial.

“You’re not related to him at all?” journalist Chris Hayes asked. “There’s not a weird kernel of truth that’s through some game?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Omar replied.

Omar’s marriage history is complex: Omar and Elmi were married by a Christian minister on Feb. 12, 2009, though Omar is Muslim, the New York Post reported. At that time Omar shared two children with Ahmed Hirsi, whom she wedded in a religious ceremony in 2002, but never legally married. A few months after her legal marriage to Elmi, in May 2009, Hirsi listed the address that appears on the Omar-Elmi marriage license as his residence, suggesting he still lived with Omar while she was legally married to Elmi, Alpha News reported. Omar had a third child with Hirsi in 2012. Omar and Elmi’s divorce was finalized in 2017.

A heavily redacted Department of Justice filing identified the Minnesota Democrat as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar.”

Somali women do not traditionally assume their husbands’ last names, according to the St. Cloud Times.

In Somalia, where clans bind families together for generations, your name is based on your father’s family. Children are given a unique first name, but not a middle name or a last name. Instead, a child’s first name is followed by the first name of his father, paternal grandfather, and paternal great-grandfather.

The name of Omar’s “gay” ex-husband as it appears on their marriage certificate indicates that he is the son of someone named Nur Said. According to the DOJ, Omar’s name indicates she is the daughter of Nur Said.

Omar has identified her father as Nur Omar Mohamed.

Omar’s father used the name Nur Said on Facebook, an archived post by Omar’s sister Sahra Noor reveals, Alpha News reported in 2016. Omar also identified her father as Nur Said in a since-deleted tweet archived by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Omar said through a spokesperson in 2019 that “Nur Said” was a childhood nickname based on “Happy Light” in Arabic. Somalis speak the Somali language, not Arabic.

Other archived social media posts link Omar to individuals with the same patronymic names as her ex-husband — names inherited from the father’s family line — and identify those individuals as her siblings.

A 2016 Facebook post identifies her sister as Leila Elmi. That woman lists “Nur Said Elmi” as her father on her marriage certificate.

In September 2026, Elmi authored a second descriptive study with The Schumacher Institute summarizing interviews across four research sites in Kenya about the criminalization of homosexuality and public hostility toward gay people.

The 41-year-old PhD candidate benefits from funding from the government of the United Kingdom through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the country’s largest funder of social sciences research, according to his LinkedIn page.

He previously studied at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS), University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, and at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), the page states.