The "barbaric" truth of the Battle of Mogadishu

In 1993, 18 American peacekeepers were killed by Somali militiamen. What went wrong – and was this a “dangerous precedent”?

By: Colin Freeman / The Daily Telegraph (title: The 'barbaric' true story of Black Hawk Down)
Translated by: Agron Shala / Telegrafi.com

Sergeant Kenneth Thomas remembers the moment the incident occurred Black Hawk Down [the crash of the American helicopter Black Hawk - Black Hawk; it is about what is known as the Battle of Mogadishu of October 3 and 4, 1993], in Mogadishu, began to feel like a movie script. It was October 3, 1993, and after an attack on the warlord's hideout in the center of the capital, Mogadishu, he and about 100 other American troops found themselves surrounded by thousands of Somali militia.

“We called it a Hollywood moment because we had never seen anything like it except in the movies,” recalls Thomas, 59, who had joined the U.S. Army just two years earlier, following in the footsteps of his Vietnam War veteran father. “There was so much shooting going on in every direction, bullets coming in, bullets going out. I don’t remember feeling shocked — but then people were getting shot and falling.”

That’s when the Hollywood script took a wrong turn, just as the “bad guys” were so close to victory. In the 18-hour battle that followed, 18 American troops were killed and 73 wounded, making it the deadliest episode in American military history since the Vietnam War. To add to the horror, the soldiers’ bodies were dragged through the streets by cheering militiamen. Four days later, President Bill Clinton announced the U.S. withdrawal, taking with him a bitter lesson about the dangers of intervening in other countries.

The whole story has already been documented in detail, first by Mark Bowden in his 1999 bestseller, Black Hawk Down, and then by Ridley Scott in his 2001 film of the same title. The enduring power of this event has now been explored in a documentary. Netflix – a new three-part series currently airing.

Surviving Black Hawk Down It is a comprehensive account – an acknowledgement that even after the shooting stops, the battle over historical narrative continues. Was this a humiliating defeat for the world’s leading superpower, as many have claimed? Or was it, as some American veterans, like Sergeant Thomas, say, a bloody story of heroism, where they held out against impossible odds? How was it perceived by Somalis – were they proud to have defeated the great American power, even though it hastened their nation’s descent into decades of anarchy?

I had to consider these questions, personally, when I first visited Mogadishu as a correspondent for the daily. The Telegraph in 2006, where the remains of one of the helicopters still stood in the back garden of a woman known as “Mrs. Black Hawk Down”. For a fee, she allowed journalists to photograph the wreckage – a scorched and shattered symbol of how Somalia had become a dangerous and lawless place. Two years later, I experienced that lawlessness firsthand, spending six weeks trapped in a cave while reporting on Somalia’s piracy epidemic. I was released without major damage, but I had plenty of time to wonder if Somalia would have fared better if helicopters had been deployed. Black Hawk they wouldn't have fallen that day.

I have no idea if the remains of the helicopter are still there, but most Somalis over the age of 40 keep vivid memories of the day it went down.

"Just as everyone in Britain remembers the day Princess Diana died, everyone in Mogadishu knows where she was on October 3, 1993," says Jack McInnes, the documentary's director. Surviving Black Hawk Down who interviewed locals, American troops and former militiamen. He worked together with British producer and reporter Channel four, Jamal Osman, who was born in Somalia and has extensive contacts there. However, even today, the Somali capital remains a dangerous place for Western film crews, so during the making of the documentary, many participants were sent for interviews to neighboring Kenya.

It is not surprising that both sides give very different perspectives, but the events leading up to the incident occurred roughly as follows.

After the outbreak of clan warfare following the overthrow of the Soviet-backed Somali dictator Siad Barre, a UN peacekeeping force of almost 40 troops, three-quarters of whom were American, was sent to Mogadishu to stop warlords from looting aid to stave off famine. What initially seemed like a military version of Live Aid [the 1985 humanitarian rock concert], then turned into a power struggle with warlords, particularly Mohamed Farah Aideedi, whose forces had played a key role in Barre's downfall. In a country where rule was tied to the gun, Aideedi felt he had the right to be Barre's successor and feared that UN support for multi-party elections would thwart his goals.

Both sides, the peacekeepers and the Somali militia, accused each other of atrocities. In June 1993, Aideed's forces were blamed for an ambush that killed 24 Pakistani troops. A month later, US helicopters bombed a house in Mogadishu believed to be housing Aideed's men, but were blamed for killing dozens of clan elders who were talking about peace.

Whatever the truth, it turned many Somalis against the foreign presence. So in an attack on another Aideedi hideout in October, US forces landed troops by helicopter to kick down a door rather than bomb it from a distance, because they wanted to avoid innocent casualties. The plan was to fly over the building and rappel down from a height of 20 metres – but, as Sergeant Thomas recalls, that’s where the problems started.

“Racing simply means sliding down with your hands, without any safety ropes or climbing gear,” he tells me over the phone from the US. “But one of my friends didn’t grab the rope because the helicopter moved to avoid the gunfire, and he fell 15 metres, breaking his spine. From the start, the mission was taking a serious turn.”

Although the start was uncertain, he says the attack was successful, capturing a dozen of Aideed's aides within half an hour, who were to be loaded into a convoy with Humvee [armored military vehicle] that had surrounded the building. Then, a few minutes later, the unimaginable happened: the first of three helicopters Black Hawk was shot down by a bazooka – something few thought possible given the helicopters’ high speed. But Aideed’s forces, using techniques developed by the Afghan mujahideen, had dug hidden holes to fire directly into the sky, while the bazooka warheads were modified to explode in midair rather than requiring a direct hit.

From that moment on, the assault group also had to act as a rescue force for the downed helicopter crew, although even then Sergeant Thomas was certain they would win. The enemy, after all, was not an elite force like the units Rangers and Delta Force, but simply “guys with flip-flops in the back of pickup trucks,” who in most cases didn’t even know how to shoot properly. However, the disorganized militias had an advantage that most foreign soldiers didn’t have.

"These American men had never been in a single battle," militiaman Yasin Dheere says in the documentary. "They were schoolboys. I was a warrior with 30 or 40 battles under my belt."

And, indeed, what the Somalis lacked in technique, they made up for in fighting spirit, and so numerical strength began to prevail. Thomas's friend, Earl Fillmore, was killed just five meters away as they tried to reach the downed helicopter.

"If you don't believe there's a soul inside a human body, then you weren't there when someone died," Thomas says. "Because, 60 seconds ago, that was Earl. And then, when I got to him, he just looked like a wax museum figure of a man I used to know."

As Aideed's supporters poured in from all over Mogadishu to join the fight, it was the Americans' turn to feel like surrounded prey, as militiamen blocked escape routes through the city's narrow alleys.

"Imagine trying to turn a vehicle around in a narrow alley during a gunfight," says specialist Brad Thomas, who was trying to evacuate the wounded with a Humvee"We faced one blockade after another... wandering around the streets while they shot at us."

Another soldier, identified only as “Dave” in the documentary, admits to shooting into crowds of Somalis. “I have no problem saying it, because there were people shooting at us from those crowds, and I couldn’t sit there and figure out who was shooting at me,” he says. “If you were there on October 3, you wouldn’t be doing any good.”

"It was madness, it was barbarism," adds specialist Thomas, who says that "I tried to kill anyone I could see who was hostile or acting in a hostile manner."

And the situation was about to get even more brutal. A rescue convoy led by Pakistani tanks finally helped the besieged troops back to base, only to see the news broadcasts of their dead comrades being dragged through the streets. “Everyone was screaming at the TV, ‘What the hell is this?’” says Specialist Thomas. “It was absolutely disgusting and I said to myself, ‘These people’s families are watching this.’”

Of course they did. In the US, Carmen Gordon, the wife of Sergeant Gary Gordon, had just been informed that he had been declared “Missing in Action” – a term she had not heard used since the Vietnam War. Then, she saw on the news the macabre images of bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. “I couldn’t understand how humanity could be so cruel,” she says. Meanwhile, videos of the captured helicopter pilot also emerged Black hawk, Mike Durant, who at one point was beaten with the severed arm of a crewmate. “I thought there’s no way out of here, I’m going to die,” he recalls.

After secret negotiations, Durant was released in a “goodwill gesture” by Aideedi, who feared US retaliation. However, six months later, all US troops had left, with other UN forces quickly following the US lead. The Somalis suffered up to 500 killed and 1 wounded, but some still insist it was worth it. “Even if 000 people died, it didn’t matter,” says fighter Nuur Hassan, who took up arms after being mistreated at a UN checkpoint. “Our goal was the freedom of Somalia.”

But while Aideedi's fighters celebrated victory, the country suffered in the long run. After the UN withdrew, Somalia was abandoned by the international community, left without a functioning government for nearly two decades, while pirates and Islamists took advantage of the power vacuum. Aideedi himself was killed by a sniper in Mogadishu three years later.

Trauma of Black Hawk Down had repercussions across Africa, contributing to Washington's reluctance to intervene militarily during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which up to 800 people were massacred. It also dogged American policymakers during decision-making on the Bosnian War (1992-1995), a brutal conflict in the heart of Europe, in which over 100 people were killed. In fact, the US did not regain confidence for major military interventions on the ground until Afghanistan in 2001, and the incident Black Hawk Down It remains a "lesson learned" in US military circles today.

For Sergeant Thomas, who left the army four years later and is now a country music singer and motivational speaker, the loss of America's self-confidence was perhaps the greatest cost. Every ten years, he and his fellow soldiers gather for a reunion, where they still remember that fateful day with pride. If there is one thing he regrets, though, it is that America's political leaders lost the will to continue the mission in Somalia. The shadow of Black Hawk Down-it continues to be felt even after more than two decades – Donald Trump's last election platform was firmly based on American isolationism and the desire to end "all foreign wars."

“It was a mistake for America to withdraw from the world, and I would cite Rwanda as an example of that,” he says. “It set a dangerous precedent – ​​that if you inflict bloody defeat on a superpower and drag their troops into the streets, the American public has no patience to continue it.” /Telegraph/