Rep. Ilhan Omar describes her late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, as “an educator” in her memoir, according to Snopes. His 2020 Sahan Journal obituary describes a different career. He was a colonel in the Somali National Army who led a regiment in the 1977–1978 war with Ethiopia. His military career ended in 1991, when dictator Siad Barre’s regime collapsed.

A former army comrade told the paper that Nur joined the army after receiving a military education in Russia. The record of the regime he served explains why the distinction matters.

Barre seized power in a 1969 coup and ruled Somalia until 1991, governing it as a one-party state through the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party. His ruling council aligned itself with the Soviet Union and denounced American policy in Africa as imperialist.

In 1977, Moscow backed Ethiopia in the Ogaden War. That November, Barre abrogated the Soviet friendship treaty, expelled all Soviet military and civilian advisers, and ended Soviet access to Somali military facilities. Nur led his regiment against Ethiopian forces supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba and remained in Barre’s army after the break with Moscow.

After a 1971 coup attempt, Barre executed members of the three leading clans, including the Majerteen. He made clan membership the organizing principle of Somali politics, according to an account drawing on State Department and Africa Watch reporting.

Barre claimed that Islam and socialism were compatible but did not tolerate religious opposition. When 23 shaykhs protested his 1975 family law, his security forces arrested them. Ten were executed for “acting on behalf of foreign powers,” according to a CIA review.

After Majerteen officers attempted a coup in April 1978, the regime punished the entire clan. Africa Watch documented extrajudicial executions, rape, and the killing of livestock as part of a scorched-earth policy intended to cut off civilian support for Majerteen rebels.

Barre’s Red Berets, his presidential guard, destroyed small reservoirs around Galcaio to deny water to Majerteen herders and their animals, according to the Library of Congress country study. Nur was himself Majerteen, and Omar wrote in her memoir that the clan was initially subjected to Barre’s crackdown.

The State Department’s 1989 human rights report on Somalia documented a police state. Citizens had no legal means to change their government. Opposition groups and criticism of the government were illegal. The government owned all radio and television outlets and the country’s six newspapers. Possession of an unauthorized publication carried a prison sentence of 5 to 15 years. Law No. 54 of 1970 made “publishing antistate propaganda” a capital offense. Organizing a strike was also punishable by death.

Security services detained suspected opponents indefinitely, often incommunicado. Military officers heard National Security Court cases behind closed doors, with no right of appeal. Released detainees described torture in the “Mig” position, with their hands and feet bound behind their backs and pulled tight.

By 1989, Barre had appointed his son commander of the armed forces and another relative chief of police. Members of his Marehan subclan commanded most military units.

The worst abuses fell on the Isaaq clan of northern Somalia, the base of the rebel Somali National Movement. A U.S. GAO report found that suspected government opponents were arrested and imprisoned, sometimes tortured and executed. Many civilians had to pay to secure their release.

When the rebels took Hargeisa in May 1988, the army attacked with heavy artillery and aerial bombardment, indiscriminately hitting civilian targets. The Somali air force reportedly attacked survivors gathering outside the city to flee to Ethiopia. Human Rights Watch described the campaign as “savage counterinsurgency tactics.” The Center for Justice and Accountability estimates that the bombing destroyed about 70 percent of Hargeisa and killed more than 5,000 civilians.

After retaking the city, forces under Barre’s son-in-law, Gen. Mohammed Said Hersi “Morgan,” planted thousands of land mines in Hargeisa, often inside homes. Locals call him “the butcher of Hargeisa.”

A State Department-commissioned study, Robert Gersony’s Why Somalis Flee, conservatively estimated that the Somali Armed Forces deliberately murdered at least 5,000 unarmed Isaaq civilians between May 1988 and March 1989. The State Department’s 1989 human rights report found that about 90 percent of Isaaq homes, businesses, and property in Hargeisa were destroyed or severely damaged.

By the end of 1989, an estimated 324,000 Somali refugees, mainly Isaaqs, were in Ethiopia. Experts now count more than 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most in the area known as the Valley of Death. Regime opponents were rounded up, bound, taken to these sites, shot, and buried in unmarked graves. Most of the graves lie at Malko Durduro, near the former headquarters of the Somali National Army’s 26th Division.

The killing continued in the capital. After riots in Mogadishu in July 1989, soldiers took 46 Isaaq men to a beach outside the city and shot them, according to the State Department. Witnesses and a survivor said the victims were selected by their accents. Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal concerning extrajudicial executions in the northern port of Berbera on August 16, 1990, naming more than a dozen victims, including a former police officer.

On July 6, 1990, the Red Berets fired into a crowd at a Mogadishu soccer stadium after fans jeered Barre’s speech. Human Rights Watch reported more than 100 civilians killed and over 300 injured. Hospital counts reported by AP, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times confirmed at least 65 deaths. The government initially claimed three deaths and called the shooting “a chance accident,” according to a Canadian government summary.

That same year, the government put 45 people on trial for signing a political manifesto critical of the regime, according to the State Department. Human Rights Watch reported nightly gunfire in Mogadishu, with bodies found in different neighborhoods each morning.

In 2001, a United Nations-commissioned investigation concluded that “the crime of genocide was conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somalia Government against the Isaaq people of northern Somalia,” according to The Nation. Led by Chris Mburu, the investigation collected more than 150 testimonies and assigned responsibility to the state and its command structure, according to a Factually summary.

In 2014, Somalia’s federal government acknowledged and condemned the regime’s atrocities, particularly those committed against Somaliland, according to the Center for Justice and Accountability. Estimates of the total death toll in the Isaaq genocide range from at least 50,000 to about 200,000.

Nur Omar Mohamed held the rank of colonel throughout this period. No public record documents his activities between 1978 and 1991, and no court or official body has found that he personally participated in atrocities. In March 2026, the government of Somaliland publicly accused him of participating in the Isaaq genocide.

The family fled to a refugee camp in Kenya after the regime fell and arrived in the United States as refugees in 1995. Omar’s description of her father as an educator omits his service as a colonel in Barre’s army until its collapse, including the years when the U.S. government documented the army’s murder of thousands of unarmed civilians, bombardment of its own cities, and execution of men selected by their accents.

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