A reader might be surprised, a few pages later, when Omar mentions, “Our family of civil servants and teachers was well off enough to have a guarded compound and driver. But I didn’t like the attention I received from the other kids for the in-your-face privilege of our white Toyota Corolla and our driver, Fatah.”
At the time Somalia was one of the poorest countries in the world; a reader might well wonder what kind of a family of teachers and lighthouse managers could afford a guarded compound and driver. Later in the book, describing how the country’s conflicts spurred her family to flee, Omar describes someone attempting to break into the compound. “After about an hour of quiet, we heard a massive volley of gunfire at the gate. Bullets — loud, loud, bullets — banged over and over at our gate.”
The sequence of events makes more sense when you learn that Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was a colonel in the Somali army. After his death from complications from Covid-19 in 2020, Sahan Journal, a Minnesota news site, wrote an obituary that noted, “Nur’s prestigious career in the military ended in 1991 after the Barre regime was ousted, and the country sank into civil war. The family escaped to Utange refugee camp in Kenya.”
From the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale . . . and their Genocide Studies Program:
Between 1960 and 1991, the government of Somalia killed hundreds of thousands of people in the region known as Somaliland in northeast Somalia. Most belonged to the Isaaq ethnic group, the predominant identity group in the area. The perpetrators deployed sophisticated, deliberate and systematically planned and executed campaign of genocide. A campaign designed to depopulate Somaliland of its majority Isaaq people.
The Genocide policy was allegedly documented in Somalia’s official genocide document: ‘The Final Solution to the Isaaq Problem’. Somalia used its air force, army and navy to flatten Somaliland’s largest cities, poisoned its wells, aerially bombard cities and critical infrastructure, strafed fleeing civilians, use rape as a weapon of war, use man-made famine as a weapon of war, impose a naval and economic blockade, impose a 15 year state of emergency and curfew, and lay more than a million mines in civilian areas.
A report commissioned by the United States State Department in 1989 concluded that during the Somali Army’s campaign against the Somali National Movement (a anti-government insurgency based in the northeast with a large Isaaq component), “the appearance that victims were selected for . . . killings principally because of their ethnic identity is unmistakable.”
From a Human Rights Watch report, published in 1990:
It is difficult to overstate the Somali government’s brutality towards its people, or to measure the impact of its murderous policies. Two decades of the presidency of President Siad Barre have resulted in human rights violations on an unprecedented scale which have devastated the country. Even before the current wars the human rights of Somali citizens were violated systematically, violently and with absolute impunity. The cost is staggeringly high in any terms, with people dead, wounded, displaced and impoverished and cities demolished.
The most bloody conflict, and the longest lasting, has been the war in the north against the Isaak clan, the largest in the region. The government has been actively at war with the Isaaks throughout the 1980s, and particularly since 1981, after the creation of an Isaak-based anti-government guerrilla organization, the Somali National Movement (SNM), regarded as “anti-government,” a label that justifies any abuse, including murder.
The Nation, writing in 2018:
Between 1987 and 1989, the regime of Somali dictator Siad Barre massacred an estimated 200,000 members of the Isaaq tribe, the largest clan group in the northwest part of Somalia. At the time, some Isaaqs were fighting for independence, and to eliminate the threat, Barre tried to exterminate all of them. Experts now say there are more than 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most of them in the Valley of Death.
You’re not going to believe who attempted to represent the government of Somali dictator Siad Barre in Washington at this time: Paul Manafort, a lobbyist who would become the chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In 1989, Manafort sent K. Riva Levinson, a new hire, to Mogadishu to try to sign Barre as a client. She says Manafort told her, “We all know Barre is a bad guy, Riva. We just have to make sure he’s our bad guy.”)
But here’s the paragraph in The Nation article that deserves the most attention:
One thing Somalilanders are adamant about is that no one involved with the Somali government in 1988 can claim they didn’t know. “I think everybody was aware of what was happening,” Saad, the foreign minister, told us. “Perhaps they didn’t have the full picture of what was happening, but the fact that the Siad Barre regime was undemocratic and brutal and murdering many civilians was well-known. . . . But sometimes superpowers look the other way.” [Emphasis added.]
The Somali government was using its military to commit genocide for the better part of three decades, intensifying in the late 1980s. How did Nur Omar Mohamed have a “prestigious career in the military” and rise to the rank of colonel with no role in that military’s massive-scale genocide?
Some contend that Nur Omar Mohamed must have played a role in that genocide. Back in July 2025, Adali Warsame wrote in the Somaliland Chronicle:
His rank, authority, membership of the regime Daarood clan, and 10+ years of having climbed the hierarchy in Somalia military to the rank of Colonel, placed him squarely in the Somali military’s command hierarchy during and at the height of its Isaaq genocide campaign. Based on his position, loyalty to the regime, and his role in the military, it is virtually certain that he had intimate knowledge of and involvement in the planning, conception, direction and execution of the genocide.
Mohamed Haji Ingiriis is a Ph.D. candidate in African Studies at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford, specializing in Somali Studies. Earlier this month, Ingiriis told the New York Post:
“He was a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime,” historian and Oxford University doctoral researcher Mohamed Haji Ingiriis told The Post. “Ilhan’s father was never an educator.”
He added, “Nur Said was a military officer who was loyal to the regime until the end. He was part and parcel of those who caused and created the mayhem they ‘fled’ to live comfortably in the United States.”
The soldier climbed up the military ranks to colonel through postings in Mogadishu, Hargeisa and Garbahaarrey — Barre’s hometown which served as a key military base — under his “real name” Nur Said.
A posting in Hargeisa, you say? From that 1990 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report:
War broke out on May 27, 1988, when the SNM attacked Burao, one of the main towns in the north. On May 31, they attacked Hargeisa, the provincial capital of the region and the second city in the country. Refugees told Africa Watch repeatedly that, frustrated by their efforts to defeat in direct combat the small and poorly armed SNM guerrilla force, the army turned its firepower, including its air force and artillery, against them, the civilian population, causing predictably high casualties. Our estimate of the number killed during the past nineteen months, shot point blank range, or as a result of aerial bombardment and artillery shelling is in the vicinity of 50,000 to 60,000.
That HRW report also notes, “about eighty [military] officers were executed in Hargeisa for their opposition to the handling of the war.”
The regime set up something called a “Mobile Military Court.”
Hargeisa served as the headquarters of the court. It was composed only of military officers. It had offices in different sectors of the army which were under different military commands. As soon as “disturbances” were reported, the court would be dispatched to the area. The military were in charge, though they were sometimes accompanied by NSS officers whose task was to conduct investigations. Initially, it tried businessmen and people with a certain level of education whom the government regarded as potential opponents. But within a short space of time, anyone who was politically active, such as students, or any group that the regime mistrusted and regarded as a social or economic base for the SNM, such as petty traders, nomads and farmers, was also tried. The military court became synonymous with executions. Colloquially, its name was “Guilty or Innocent, You Will be Found Guilty” (“Ama Qab, Ama ha Qabin, Ama wa lagu Qabadsiin”).
We’re supposed to believe that Nur Omar Mohamed, a colonel in the Somali army, did only other unrelated tasks when all these horrors were being perpetuated by that same army, and none of his work during his entire career had anything to do with the ongoing genocide?
