Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) web of shady family ties goes even deeper than her alleged marriage to her brother — reportedly using her political offices to secure millions of dollars for a Minneapolis health clinic operated by her sister, who is married to a top Somali government official.
Omar’s elder sister, Sahra Noor, states on her LinkedIn profile that she was the CEO of People’s Center Clinics & Services from July 2014 to April 2018. In January 2017, Omar began her two-year term as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives.
People’s Center is in the Minneapolis neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside, nicknamed “Little Mogadishu” for its high Somali migrant population, many of whom do not speak English.
The 2017 capital budget approved by the state legislature included $2.2 million for the clinic, which operates as a nonprofit that has received $33 million in Health and Human Services (HHS) grants since 2002.
While People’s Center has an active contract pharmacy agreement for HHS’s 340B Drug Pricing Program with “Degdeg’s Carepoint Pharmacy,” signed by Noor in 2015, the pharmacy lost its license in 2017 and is listed as “permanently closed” on Google Maps.
Omar boasted about getting the $2.2 million for the clinic that was being run by her sister at the time, celebrating the renovations it completed in 2022 along with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D), state Sen. Omar Fateh (D-MN), and other Democrats:
The renovations included a walk-in clinic, a fitness center, a prayer room, and a call center with staffers fluent in the East African languages of Somali, Oromo, and Amharic, Minneapolis-based African community newspaper Mshale reported.
As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Omar secured another $1 million for clinic renovations, stating in April 2022 that “neither I nor my immediate family has any financial interest in this project.”
In April 2024, People’s Center credited Omar for getting them $1 million in congressionally directed funding.
When the media was asking Omar and her family difficult questions about the nature of her multiple marriages, one allegedly to her brother, Noor left her CEO position and moved back to Africa, running her own healthcare consultancy called Grit Partners in Kenya — which she claimed facilitated “peer learning session” projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Noor’s husband, Mohamed Keynan, held multiple positions within the Minnesota state and local governments before also moving back to Africa to work as chief of staff to then-Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre and policy advisor to then-President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, commonly known as Farmaajo.
Prior to becoming one of the top advisors in Somalia, Keynan’s LinkedIn states he was a management analyst in the Minnesota Department of Human Services, a city planning commissioner in the Twin Cities suburb of Roseville, and a contracts manager for Hennepin County.
In 2020, Noor co-founded a telehealth startup called Hello! Caafi, which claimed to be “helping millions in Somalia gain access to essential health services in their local communities” by connecting them with healthcare professionals who speak Somali.
The website appears to have been taken down, and the company’s last Facebook post was made in 2022.
Another questionable detail about Hello! Caafi is that it is completely unclear where calls were being connected to, with the location of Somali-speaking health providers never being specified on any webpages or in any marketing materials or press releases.
One might even wonder if Ilhan Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, had used the U.S. government-funded call center at her former place of employment, People’s Center in Cedar-Riverside, to funnel calls from Somalia.
Possibly the most shocking tidbit about Noor’s ventures comes from a discovery in the code of Grit Partners website made in 2019 by investigative journalist David Steinberg, blowing up Omar’s claim that she did not have any way to contact her former husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
It has long been theorized that Elmi, a Somali-born British citizen, is her brother who legally married her in 2009 in order to move to the U.S.
While still married to Elmi, Omar was living with her “other” husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, whom she married in a religious ceremony and had three children with.
In 2017, Omar swore under oath in a divorce filing that she had not seen Elmi in six years and had no way to locate or contact him — a claim contradicted by the source code for Noor’s Kenya-based consultant firm.
The code, screenshotted and shared on social media by Steinberg, shows that Elmi was logged into his personal Instagram account, named @ahmedelmi, while he was creating the link to Grit Partner’s Instagram account.
One can view an archived version of the website and right-click to select “view source” to see Elmi’s name.
His LinkedIn page says he has worked as a freelance creator of “content, communications strategies and editorial for nonprofits, start-ups and global brands” since 2014.
If Omar did not know anyone who could find her estranged husband, the question is why would he help her sister on her firm’s website?
“The ties between Omar’s supposedly long-lost ex-husband and Omar’s sister appear to contradict Omar’s sworn testimony and add to the body of evidence that the ex-husband may be her brother, making all three siblings,” Alpha News reported of Steinberg’s discovery.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
