"What Went Wrong in Somalia?"

U.S. Army Rangers Killed in Downed Helicopter

Magazine article

By: Louise Leif, et al.

Date: October 18, 1993

Source: U.S. News & World Report.

About the Author: Louise Leif is a former journalist, with extensive experience in both print and television media. Leif is fluent in Arabic and has coordinated seminars dealing with women's rights, diplomacy, and Arab television. She is currently employed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

INTRODUCTION

By the fall of 1992, the nation of Somalia was war-torn and ravaged by famine. An estimated half million Somalis were already dead, and hundreds of thousands more were facing possible starvation. Despite extensive efforts by the United Nations (UN) and other international aid organizations, a long history of ongoing clan violence within the nation created a major obstacle to achieving famine relief. In response to this situation, U.S. President George H. W. Bush deployed U.S. troops to Somalia in order to protect international relief workers. This effort, dubbed "Operation Restore Hope," accompanied a UN mandate both to protect humanitarian workers and to secure a stable environment for eventual political self-rule, employing military force as necessary.

Over the following year, almost 30,000 U.S. troops, along with 10,000 soldiers from other nations, entered Somalia, and by mid-1993, mass starvation had been largely eliminated. The peacekeepers then faced the task of overcoming the decades-long intertribal conflicts within the war-torn nation. Among the most notorious of the warlords was former army general Mohamed Farrah Aidid, leader of the Habr Gidr clan.

Aidid had risen to the top of the UN's wanted list following a bloody battle with UN forces in June 1993 in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed and several were skinned. In response, the UN called for his arrest. The UN relied on specially trained U.S. Army units to conduct surgical strikes in which Aidid and his close associates would be extracted from their hideouts to stand trial. The Army Rangers arrived in August, with plans to locate and apprehend Aidid that fall. On October 3, the Rangers got their opportunity, when reliable intelligence placed Aidid and his top lieutenants in the town of Mogadishu, at the Olympic Hotel.

PRIMARY SOURCE

At first the raid went like clockwork. "The intelligence was very good, it was very timely," says a U.S. military official. At 3:30 p.m. about 100 Rangers of Task Force 160 "fast roped" down from Blackhawk helicopters, descending on the hotel and quickly capturing 19 of Aidid's aides. Unable to climb back up to their helicopters with their prisoners, the soldiers waited for another Ranger detachment to make its way to the hotel through Mogadishu's shattered streets in trucks and humvees. Then disaster struck. One Blackhawk was hit by 23-mm cannon fire from the hotel and crashed. Minutes later a second helicopter was hit and went down about 1/14 miles from where the first Blackhawk had crashed. A third helicopter arrived; it was hit and limped back to the relative safety of the city's seaport.

Aidid's men opened up on the trapped Americans from rooftops, buildings and even trees. The Rangers, armed only with machine guns and grenade launchers, were cut off and outgunned. "Those guys were flat playing Custer's last stand," says one senior officer. A rescue convoy finally broke through from the airport some nine hours later, but at least 15 Americans were killed, 77 others were wounded, four were missing in action and at least one, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, was Aidid's captive.

What went wrong? How had American soldiers who had gone to Somalia for the noblest of purposes—feeding a starving nation—come to be seen by many Somalis as just another militia, and by no means an invincible one? . . . The mistakes that were made cover the waterfront, from political to tactical: . . .

False premises. Both the U.N. and the United States have based their policies on fundamental misunderstandings about Somali society, chiefly the idea that General Aidid personally was the problem and removing him from the equation was the solution. While U.N. investigators found persuasive evidence that Aidid's forces did ambush the Pakistanis, no one looked deeper to understand the interclan politics that led up to the attack. ..."Aidid is his clan," says Mohammad Sahnoun, a former U.N. envoy to Somalia who was dismissed . . . last October for criticizing U.N. operations there. "In Somali culture, the worst thing you can do is humiliate them, to do something to them you are not doing to another clan. . . . It's the kind of psychology the U.N. doesn't understand. ..."

Abandoning negotiations. On June 6, the day after the Pakistani ambush and 11 weeks before the U.N.'s inquiry into it was completed, the U.N. Security Council, with strong backing from the United States and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, passed a resolution calling for the detention and arrest of "those responsible," and the hunt for Aidid began. From that point, negotiations among the Somali factions came to a halt. [Tom] Farer and many diplomats, including members of the secretary general's own staff, thought the U.N. should have instead negotiated a cease-fire in place while it arranged a trial for Aidid by an impartial tribunal. But the U.N.'s attitude, says Farer, was "punish and convict Aidid. ..."

Reports by the Army and the Joint Chiefs' intelligence directorate, produced within two days of last week's raid, catalog a host of other mistakes committed by U.S. forces in the October 3 raid. The Rangers chose to launch their raid in midafternoon rather than take advantage of U.S. night-fighting capabilities, and the Americans were surprised by Aidid's coordinated counterattack. "We send a rescue force that's not adequate to the job," says one officer. "How many times do we have to let that happen before we catch on?"

The final and most tragic mistake, however, may be allowing the Somali debacle to discourage any U.S. involvement in post–Cold War peacekeeping operations. "We're learning terrible lessons," says a State Department official.

SIGNIFICANCE

Michael Durant, the captured U.S. soldier, was released after eleven days of captivity; his release was cited by President Bill Clinton as proof that the administration's Somalia policy was a success. While plans continued for withdrawal of U.S. troops, the administration dispatched heavy armor to protect U.S. forces in Somalia, including 30 M1-A1 tanks and Bradley armored fighting vehicles. Ironically, this type of heavy armament was urgently requested by commanders in Somalia more than two weeks before the Mogadishu debacle, and would have provided the level of firepower necessary to rescue the downed troops. On March 25, 1994, with Aidid still at large, the final U.S. troops left Somalia.

After the conflict in Somalia, Defense Secretary Les Aspin resigned, and the incident put a damper on Clinton's ongoing efforts at nation-building. In the U.S. political arena, the conflict in Somalia may have created greater reluctance to commit troops to such missions.

In 1997, Mark Bowden, a reporter for the Philadelphia Enquirer, published an extensively researched, month-long series of stories on the battle at Mogadishu titled "Black Hawk Down." The series was expanded and published as a hardcover book in 1999, and was made into a feature film directed by Ridley Scott in 2001.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Bowden, Mark. Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999.

Durant, Michael J. In the Company of Heroes. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003.

Web sites

Carnegie Reporter. "The International Reporting Project: Giving Journalists a New Perspective on the News." <http://www.carnegie.org/reporter/09/news/index2.html> (accessed June 13, 2005).

Philly Online. "BlackHawkDown." <http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/sitemap.asp> (accessed June 13, 2005).