Chapter 1: What is the true story behind the Battle of Mogadishu?
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One of the most consequential battles fought by American forces since Vietnam, this is the true story of Black Hawk Down. Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.
And today, David, we're beginning a four-part series on what is one of the most consequential, I guess, disasters in American military history, which is the Battle of Mogadishu, as it's properly known, October the 3rd and 4th, 1993. But everyone really knows it as Black Hawk Down, don't they?
Well, that's right. And I guess we'll come back throughout this series to the question of whether this really was a disaster or not, and how we should think about it.
Chapter 2: How did the humanitarian mission in Somalia escalate into a military confrontation?
But of course, this is a military confrontation, a battle that is memorialized in the very well-known Ridley Scott film, Black Hawk Down, which is actually itself based on an absolutely exceptional book written by the journalist Mark Bowden, by the same name, and from which we will be drawing extensively throughout this series. Now, interestingly, Gordon, nobody...
in Mogadishu that day would have called it Black Hawk Down. The Americans who were there, we'll come to them in a moment, would have called it simply being in Mogadishu or the Battle of the Black Sea. Again, we'll come back to what that means.
Chapter 3: What were the key events leading to the Battle of Mogadishu?
Somalis called it Ma'alinti Rangers, the Day of the Rangers. So nobody there, of course, there are going to be several Black Hawk helicopters shot down, but the incident has kind of come to be known as Blackhawk Down because of the book and the film of that same name. Now, it is one of the most consequential battles fought by American forces since Vietnam. It's 18 Americans are killed.
19 are actually killed over the course of the, if you include just the day after the battle ended. 73 wounded. It is 15 hours of continuous combat against an enemy Somali militia armed with basically just AK-47s and rocket propelled grenades. and I guess it's probably a good point to say Gordon before we get,
too much further into this, that for those who have made the decision to listen to this series with children, perhaps don't.
Chapter 4: Who was Mohamed Farah Aidid and what role did he play in the conflict?
We will be describing this battle using the recollections of many of the people who were there. So it is going to be at times a bit graphic. So warning for those who are squeamish about such things or have decided to listen to this with young children.
That's right. It is an amazing story of an individual battle, but I think what makes it more than just a dramatic story is that it's a very consequential story, which actually tells us quite a lot about some bigger issues. One of them is this phrase, mission creep. which I think really does come out of what happens in Somalia that day in October 1993.
As we'll see, it starts with a humanitarian operation to feed starving people and it becomes a manhunt for a warlord and then ends up escalating into this military confrontation in an environment the American commanders didn't really understand. and to something which becomes incredibly deadly for both sides.
And it is a story of how an operation with relatively limited goals at the start can transform into something else over time.
On that point, Gordon, it made me think, and I think we'll return to this as we get closer to the end of this series, but whether there are some lessons or insights for what is going on right now in Iran. Let's take, for example, the idea of going and conducting a raid to capture or destroy Iran's highly enriched uranium. You could see how something that in...
kind of a limited context could make some sense, but how that could then sort of sprawl toward a much wider engagement with a whole bunch of unforeseen consequences.
Yeah, I think one of the interesting aspects of this story to me is how, and again, the modern parallels are interesting. You can have the US military power be totally dominant when it comes to technology, when it comes to firepower, compared to the adversary it's going up against. But still, it just takes small things to go wrong.
And things do go wrong in conflict and wars, which can then go disastrously wrong because of the kind of highly unpredictable situation, the nature of conflict. And then suddenly, particularly when you're on the enemy's home turf, that can turn into something much more serious and much more disastrous.
So as you said, you could imagine how a discrete raid to do something in Iran, all you need is one or two things to go wrong and suddenly
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Chapter 5: What were the intelligence failures leading up to the raid on October 3rd?
And you see America's adversaries, including, I think, Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, look at what happened to America in Somalia and take lessons from that and try and replicate it. Again, because they come to believe that the American public and the American government won't be able to sustain the military taking casualties in a very public way.
So it's an incident which does have enormous repercussions, doesn't it?
That's right. And it's a battle, as we'll see, that I think you could argue nobody wins. And yet it's remarkably important. On all sides. So a bit of a paradox there. But I think, Gordon, it's probably worth setting up a bit of Somalia and Somalian history just to kind of cast the background for this conflict.
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Chapter 6: What were the dynamics of the Somali National Alliance during the conflict?
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Okay, so Somalia, for those who are unawares, it sits on the northeastern corner of the African continent, kind of up in the Horn of Africa, facing Arabia. And I think, Gordon, there are probably five things that listeners should know about Somalian history before we get to the battle itself.
So the first one is that, on paper, Somalia should have been one of Africa's easiest countries to build into territory. a stable nation because unlike many other kind of modern African nation states, It is not a patchwork of different ethnic groups. There is a single ethnic group, the Somali. There's a single language, which is Somali. There's a single religion, which is Islam.
And there is a single culture that is rooted in a kind of pastoral nomadic life.
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Chapter 7: How did the US military prepare for the raid on Aidid's lieutenants?
And the great historian of Somalia, I.M. Lewis, in his book, A Modern History of Somalia, talks about this as the Somali paradox, which is this idea that you have an incredible amount of kind of uniformity, and yet the state itself will end up collapsing fairly epically. So that's one. Two, the clan structure, the idea of clan as an organizing principle.
So Somali society is organized around a kind of elaborate genealogical system, and there are these kind of clan families that then subdivide into clans, subclans, lineages, extended families, and the level at which you unite or divide clans really depends on context. And there's a phenomenally, I think, insightful Somali proverb, which goes like this. I and Somalia against the world.
I and my clan against Somalia. I and my family against the clan. I and my brother against the family. I against my brother. And so you have kind of two things going on here. One is that the organizing principle for much of Somali political life is clan. And yet at the same time, you have almost baked into that the possibility for... an incredible amount of conflict.
So that's two, the clan structure, and that's gonna play a very important role as we'll see in how the battle unfolds. So three, the colonial partition of Africa made a lot of things worse in Somalia.
Chapter 8: What were the immediate consequences of the raid on October 3rd, 1993?
Now, what it did practically was that European colonialism essentially split the Somali people across five different territories. You had British Somaliland in the north, Italian Somalia in the south, French Somaliland, which becomes Djibouti. And there are large Somali inhabited lands in an area called the Ogaden, which are handed to Ethiopia.
Somali nationalists call these the five Somali lands. And there is a Somali kind of nationalist dream here. of uniting all of these lands into a kind of greater Somalia, which is going to drag the country into a catastrophic war.
And that is the fourth point in Somalia's history here, is that in 1977, there's a conflict called the Ogaden War, in which Somalia, armed by the Soviets, invades the Ogaden. Initially it's successful, but eventually the Soviets switch sides, decide that Ethiopia's new Marxist government is a better bet. And Somalia is decisively defeated. So this dream of kind of greater Somalia is finished.
There are 800,000 refugees who flood back into Somalia from the Ogaden into a state that has no capacity to absorb them. And the military dictator of Somalia at the time, a guy named Siad Barre, never recovers from this war. And so the fifth point here in Somalian history is that his dictatorship, Syed Barre's dictatorship, collapses into civil war in the early 1990s. Syed Barre had...
seized power in 1969 in a coup. He had actually tried ostensibly to eliminate clan politics as an organizing principle in Somali society. But what he ends up doing is actually raising up his own clan and clans allied to his own and diminishing others. And so you actually have them further sort of entrenched and enmeshed in Somali society.
And what happens is a horrendous civil conflict in Somalia, in which Siad Barre bombs his own cities, in one instance, killing maybe 50 to 100,000 of his own people in Somalia's second largest city, which is
probably one of the worst atrocities in African post-colonial history, and that in 1991, amid street fighting in Mogadishu, Zaid Barre flees into exile and Somalia fragments essentially along Klan lines into a horrendous civil war.
So you've got a civil war here by the time you get to the early 1990s, and then something else happens. And this is, I guess, the thing which draws in the international community, and ultimately the Americans, is that you get a drought in the early 1990s and a famine. And that's going to be crucial, isn't it, in kind of internationalising what's basically a failed state in the civil war.
Well, we should say that, you know, droughts are obviously, they're not uncommon in the Horn of Africa. The region, it runs on a cycle of wet and dry seasons, but they don't produce the kind of mass starvation that hit Somalia in 1991 and 1992. That is the result of the drought and the civil war.
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