Two children of Somalia's late dictator Siad Barre, including a son described as his father's "right-hand man", have been living in Columbus, Ohio, for decades, prompting survivors of the regime's atrocities to demand a federal investigation.
Ayanle Mohamed Siad, 61, lives in a $350,000 three-bedroom house in a Columbus suburb with his wife and young son. His sister, Deka Mohamed Siad, 69, co-ran a home health care company that received more than $1.8 million in Medicare funding before it closed in 2021. Neither responded to requests for comment from the New York Post, which located them and reported on community reaction to their presence.
Their father seized power in a Soviet-backed coup in 1969 and ruled Somalia for roughly 21 years. Up to 200,000 people died under his regime. When he was overthrown in 1991, Barre and his inner circle fled the country, looting an estimated $27 million in gold and cash from the central bank. He died of a heart attack in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1995.
Ayanle and Deka arrived in America shortly after the regime collapsed. They settled in Columbus, home to roughly 70,000 Somalis, the second-largest Somali community in the country after Minnesota. And they have lived there, largely undisturbed, ever since.
Mohamed Haji Ingiriis, a historian and Oxford University doctoral researcher who has studied the Barre era, told the Post that Ayanle was far more than a dictator's child. When Barre was temporarily unable to rule after an accident, Ingiriis said, Ayanle stepped in as the de facto leader.
Ingiriis described the scope of that authority:
"When his father had an accident, Ayanle became de facto ruler in the Villa Somalia, running day-to-day regime activities solely with an iron-fist. He was so powerful that he was able to appoint and dismiss regime authorities on behalf of his father."
Ingiriis added that Barre's children "were not regular children. They were part of a system that killed a lot of people." He also claimed the family "massively benefited from the embezzled properties he acquired illegally during his regime."
In Columbus, Ayanle has set up a translation services company called Somal Global Services, is linked to a café called Halwa Kismay Coffee, and in 2004 launched a nonprofit called Somali Immigrants Achieving Democracy. Photos posted online show him travelling to London, Oman, and the UAE. When the Post called his home, a person there said he was out of the country.
He has never publicly denounced his father's regime.
Ali-Guban Mohamed, 64, fled Somalia after Barre ordered a military campaign against the Isaaq clan in the country's north, a campaign that flattened cities with aerial bombardment, poisoned wells, and left more than one million landmines on grazing lands. Ali-Guban told the Post he was stunned to encounter Ayanle at a local mosque.
"Siad Barre and his men committed so many war crimes so I was shocked to see his son in the mosque enjoying his freedom."
Ali-Guban described what the regime did to his own family: "My family were rounded up in a small township called Agabur and executed. Their bodies were put into a well and that was happening across the board." He said no one has been held accountable for the campaign against the Isaaq clan.
That failure of accountability is not unique to Somalia. The broader pattern of foreign nationals with troubling backgrounds living freely in the United States has drawn increasing scrutiny from immigration enforcement advocates.
Ali-Guban did not mince words about the contradiction he sees in current U.S. immigration policy:
"The American immigration system is broken. ICE is rounding up and deporting people but the children of a known dictator with serious allegations of murder are living here."
Faisah Abdullahi, 41, arrived in Ohio in the 1990s as a child. Her father died in a refugee camp in Ethiopia during the family's journey to America. She described the night the fighting reached her home, soldiers ransacking houses, stealing cash and gold, then the bombing.
"Suddenly one night the fighting started and all we could hear was the sound of gunfire. Then the ground started to shake and bombs were dropped everywhere. It was chaos."
Abdullahi said she later came face to face with one of Barre's daughters at a local community center while dropping off her child. She offered a measured but pointed assessment: "I am older, wiser and do not know what Siad Barre's children did, but I do not think every human being is bad." But she added: "I find it very shameful to live in the same state as anyone who can celebrate an evil person who tried to wipe out my lineage."
Deka Mohamed Siad and her late husband, Abdikarim Ali Omar, a former Somali ambassador, ran Vanguard Home Health Care in Ohio. Documents reviewed by the Post show the company received more than $1.8 million in Medicare funding. The company appears to have been legitimate and filed proper paperwork, but it closed after Ali Omar died at age 70 in January 2021.
Deka remains a prominent speaker at events within the Columbus Somali community. A museum in the area, the Somali Museum of Ohio, celebrates Siad Barre and refers to the dictator as its "honorable grandfather." Neither Deka nor the museum responded to the Post's inquiries.
The fact that a family linked to a regime responsible for up to 200,000 deaths could quietly collect seven figures in federal health care dollars raises obvious questions, questions no U.S. agency appears to have asked. While ICE has been actively deporting foreign nationals convicted of serious crimes, no current investigation, charges, or enforcement actions against Barre's children have been reported.
There is at least one case where the U.S. legal system caught up with a member of Barre's inner circle. Mohamed Ali Samantar, the regime's former defense minister, moved to Virginia after the government collapsed. In 2012, a U.S. court found him liable for human rights atrocities and ordered him to pay $21 million in damages to victims who suffered years of imprisonment, torture, rape, and abduction under his watch.
Suleiman Bolaleh, a 59-year-old human rights activist who helped bring victims to testify in that case, has dedicated his life to documenting the regime's horrors. He described what he witnessed as a university student when the civil war erupted: "I did not expect to survive."
Bolaleh detailed the regime's methods in stark terms:
"His red beret soldiers were going door-to-door in civilian homes, rounding up young men and children as young as 12 and they murdered them in cold blood. They used tractors to collect the dead bodies and bury them in mass graves which are still there today."
He is now calling for a formal investigation into Barre's family members in the United States: "I am calling for an investigation to be opened against his family to find out exactly what they were doing during the civil war, what they know and to give up any proceeds they may have inherited."
Ingiriis echoed that demand, urging the U.S. government to "appoint a fact-finding commission of inquiry to investigate the barbaric and brutal atrocities committed during the military regime and hold accountable those who had done those crimes." He noted that many Somalis in Columbus have moved away from the Barre family "to flee from the trauma that happened to their own families."
The chaos Barre left behind did not end when he fled. Somalia has endured more than three decades of civil war since his overthrow, including the rise of the al-Qaida-linked militant group al-Shabab. Millions fled to refugee camps before eventually immigrating to the United States. AP News has reported that almost 58 percent of Somalis in Minnesota were born in the U.S., and of the foreign-born Somalis there, 87 percent are naturalized citizens.
The Trump administration has paused all immigration applications from Somalia and has been scaling back humanitarian aid to the country, which has one of the world's weakest health care systems. The administration's broader immigration enforcement posture, including deportation operations targeting those brought in under prior administrations, has drawn both praise from enforcement advocates and criticism from immigration groups.
But the case of the Barre children cuts differently than most immigration debates. The survivors living in Columbus are not asking the government to go easy. They are asking why the family of a dictator linked to mass atrocities has lived freely in the United States for more than 30 years while collecting federal dollars, and why no one in Washington has bothered to look into it.
As debates over immigration enforcement priorities continue to consume Washington, the Barre family's quiet life in Ohio stands as a test of whether the system can distinguish between ordinary immigrants seeking safety and the relatives of the man who created the danger they fled.
An immigration system that cannot tell the difference between the victims and the victimizers is not just broken. It is an insult to the people who survived.
