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“Remember when the liberals claimed that Obama was not a Communist Muslim, because a Muslim could not be Communist (and vice versa)?”

Somalia is overwhelmingly muslim, but was ruled by a pro-soviet. Communist military dictatorship - and it appears that Ilhan’s family were supporters. I wonder what role her father and her wider family had in supporting the dictatorship of Siad Barre, and if they had blood on their hands from the genocide his regime perpetrated?

Reportedly, Ilhan Omar’s father was a loyalist of Siad Barre in Somali, and their extended family held positions within the Barre Government. Ilhan is reportedly a member of the Majeerteen Clan, one of the Darod Family of Clans (to which Said Barre belonged). Ilhan’s family left Somali in 1991, the year that Siad Barre’s Government was thrown out of power.

Siad Barre took power through a coup in 1969, and made Somalia into a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, and a client of the Soviet Union. From Wikipedia’s Siad Barre article: “The United Nations Development Programme stated that “the 21-year regime of Siyad Barre had one of the worst human rights records in Africa.””

Just a few years before the fall of Siad Barre’s dictatorship (1987-89), his Government conducted a Genocide of the Isaaq Clan. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaaq_genocide):

“This genocide also included the levelling and complete destruction of the second and third largest cities in Somalia, Hargeisa (which was 90 per cent destroyed) and Burao (70 per cent destroyed) respectively, and had caused up to 500,000 Somalis (primarily of the Isaaq clan) to flee their land and cross the border to Hartasheikh in Ethiopia as refugees, in what was described as “one of the fastest and largest forced movements of people recorded in Africa”, and resulted in the creation of the world’s largest refugee camp then (1988), with another 400,000 being internally displaced. The scale of destruction led to Hargeisa being known as the ‘Dresden of Africa’. The killings happened during the Somali Civil War and have been referred to as a “forgotten genocide”.

So 1988 and 1989 was when refugee camps swelled with Somalis escaping the genocide of the Leftist Dictatorship in Somalia. But Omar and her family left Somalia in 1991, when the communist perpetrators of that genocide were expelled from power.