In May 1986, Barre suffered serious injuries in a life-threatening automobile accident near Mogadishu, when the car that was transporting him smashed into the back of a bus during a heavy rainstorm.

Although Barre managed to recover enough to present himself as the sole presidential candidate for re-election over a term of seven years on 23 December 1986, his poor health and advanced age led to speculation about who would succeed him in power.

Possible contenders included his son-in-law General Ahmed Suleiman Abdille, who was at the time the Minister of the Interior, in addition to Barre's vice president, Lt. Gen.

[citation needed] Following the outbreak of the civil war in 1991 and the collapse of the Barre regime, Samatar moved to the United States in order to escape persecution as a member of the former government.

[3] He and his frontline deputies faced off against their mentor and former Frunze alumni Marshal Vasily Ivanovich Petrov, who was assigned by the USSR to advise the Ethiopian Army, in addition to and likely not limited to 15,000 Cuban troops along with thousands of other socialist foreign ground forces supporting Ethiopia,[16] led by General Arnaldo Ochoa.

[17] The Ogaden Campaign was part of a broader effort to unite all of the Somali-inhabited territories in the Horn region into a Greater Somalia (Soomaaliweyn).

The individuals alleged that they had suffered physical abuse in violation of international law at the hands of soldiers or other government officials under Samatar's command,[20] which they further claimed was due to their belonging to the Isaaq clan.

[20] Supporters of Samatar described the lawsuit as a politically motivated vendetta filed by associates of the Somali National Movement (SNM), a disbanded rebel militia linked with the secessionist Somaliland region in the northwestern part of Somalia.

On 1 June 2010, in Samantar v. Yousuf, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that, although Samatar's argument was "literally possible," FSIA did not cover the issue of an official's claim to immunity.

[27] In March 2013, Abdi Farah Shirdon, Prime Minister in Somalia's newly recognized Federal Government, issued a letter to the U.S. Department of State requesting that Washington grant Samatar immunity from prosecution.