Rep. Ilhan Omar's father, Nur Omar Mohamed, died Monday after contracting COVID-19, Omar's office announced Monday. He was 67 years old.
"No words can describe what he means to me and all who knew him," Omar said in a press release. "My family and I ask for your respect and privacy during this time."
Omar also shared "tremendous sadness and pain" on her social media accounts. "Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'cuun," she wrote. "Surely we belong to God and to him shall we return."
"Our smiles always match," she wrote on an Instagram story caption to a recent photograph with her father and her husband, Tim Mynett.
Before they left Somalia due to the civil war, her father used to train teachers. They stayed in Dadaab, the refugee camp in Kenya, for four years and arrived in the United States in 1996.
Upon arrival, Omar noticed the US depicted on TV wasn't the same as the one she saw. "This doesn’t look like the America you promised,” she said.
"We’re getting to our America, Ilhan. You have to be patient," her dad replied, according to the Minneapolis City Pages.
Her daughter, Isra Hirsi, tweeted a photo with her grandfather. "Love you forever and always Awoowe," she wrote. "Miss you already."
Members of the Somali community have been sharing their condolences for Omar's father.
So far more than 115,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.