October 3, 1993 Battle of Mogadishu
On October 3, 1993, elements of the US Army Rangers and other special forces attempted to capture two of Mohamed Farrah Aidid's (a local Somali warlord) top officials in an operation which turned into a large firefight which resulted in the deaths of 18 Americann soldiers as well as more than 500 local Somalis (militia and civilians).The context of the battle was the armed intervention of the U.N. to provide food aid breaking the military siege and starvation of Adid's opponents, as is made clear in both the book and film, Black Hawk Down.
The firefight lasted almost 14 hours when an operation to capture militia leaders was thrown off course by the shooting down of one of the supporting Black Hawk helicopters, during a long delay after the operation was effectively completed; while both transport and the units to be evacuated waited for twenty additional minutes just out of sight of the other, ready to move, but each under the impression that they were to be first contacted by the other. A second Black Hawk was also downed another 20 minutes later and 2 special forces troops landed to protect the wounded pilot from the approaching mob, but were killed.
For reasons that are unclear, American forces strongly believed that RPGss could not be used against their helicopters.
Eventually reaching the first crash sites around 90 rangers found themselves under siege from heavy militia fire and despite limited air support were effectively trapped until reinforcements aided by Malaysian and Pakistani UN arrived in the early morning. No contingency planning or coordination with other UN forces had been done in anticipation of any operational difficulties.
The battle was one of the most intense urban battles faced by the US forces during the Somalian UN mission and is often cited as the reason America withdrew from UN peacekeeping duties.
According to the soldiers interviewed and quoted in the book; as the battle progressed, Adid's forces used civilians pushed out in front of their fighters as a screen less and less often, since the Americans had shown repeatedly that they were willing to fire on and kill the screening civilians in order to reach their opponents.
A film by Ridley Scott, based on the book by Mark Bowden Black Hawk Down (itself based on a series of articles for the Philadelphia Enquirer), describes the events surrounding the mission and some of the acts of bravery seen on that day. There are obvious differences between the book and the subsequent movie, which left out central sections and themes of the books, such as the involvement of civilians in the battle, and de-emphasized the key decision to stay in the area after the initial operation was completed, etc.
There have been allegations that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida movement was involved in training Aidid's men and possibly supplying large numbers of RPGs to his fighters, as al-Qaida has claimed (according to CNN).Additional Notes