Father of Somalia-born US Representative Ilhan Omar died on Monday night of complications from the novel coronavirus, local media reported. "It is with tremendous sadness and pain to say goodbye to my father," the Minnesota congresswoman tweeted late on Monday. "No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew and loved him." Ilhan began the statement with a verse from the Qur'an that states, "Surely we belong to God and to Him shall we return." Ilhan and her father Nur Omar Mohamed first came to the US 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 report. 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. "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 Omar was elected along with Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib in November 2018 making them among the first two Muslim women to serve in the US Congress. — Agencies