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Black Hawk Up, Part 3:
The US Campaign In Somalia, 1993-1997
by Chris Oakley

Summary:

In the first two chapters of this series, we reviewed the circumstances that led to Al Gore’s unexpected accession to the presidency in March of 1993; the start of the U.S. combat presence in Somalia; the first clashes between U.S. ground troops and al Qaeda fighters in Somalia; the heated showdown in Congress in 1995 over President Gore’s request for additional troops to be deployed to Somalia; and the outcome of that showdown. In this installment we’ll look back at the intensification of the fighting in Somalia as the 1996 U.S. presidential elections approached.

By September of 1995 there were 25 countries involved in Operation Hope, and that was just the number which were contributing military personnel to the effort to relieve the Somali famine and neutralize Somalia’s warlords. Ten of those countries were Islamic states, a fact which didn’t set well with either Mohammed Aidid or his chief ally, Osama bin Laden. In their eyes this was the worst kind of apostasy, and they resolved to step up their efforts to drive the United States and its “puppets” out of Somalia by any means necessary. It was around this time that U.S. and allied forces in Somalia were first confronted with the threat of suicide bomber attacks. Modeled on the Japanese kamikaze raids in the latter stages of the Second World War and the car bomb attacks on Western diplomatic outposts in Lebanon during the 1980s, the Somali suicide bombing campaign’s principal aim was to inflict such massive casualties on the international coalition forces stationed in Somalia that the governments participating in the coalition would be intimidated into pulling out of the country.

The primary factor distinguishing these new Somali suicide attacks from previous such operations, besides their sheer brutality, was the detail that they would be made primarily by foreign recruits to bin Laden and Aidid’s cause. In the past suicide bombers usually had been chosen from the local population in or near the area where the chosen target was located. However bin Laden, over the repeated and strenuous objections of his partner in crime, had determined it would be better in this instance to use outside personnel given that (in bin Laden’s view at least) most Somali fighters in Aidid’s forces lacked the necessary stomach or training for the job.

Bin Laden and Aidid initiated their suicide bombing campaign with an attack on a U.S. Marine barracks near the Puntland provincial town of Ufeyn on September 8th. The barracks was targeted primarily for the fact that it was at the time the third-largest American military installation in the Horn of Africa region; the secondary reason had to do with avenging the deaths of a number of al-Qaeda fighters two weeks earlier in a raid on suspected terrorist safe houses in the village of Iskushuban. The bombs were designed to inflict a maximum number of casualties in the shortest possible time, and in the early phase of operations at least the bombers were highly successful in achieving that goal; 57 Marines were killed and 130 more injured in the initial suicide bombings at Ufeyn. In an anonymous statement faxed to the UPI bureau in Nairobi just hours after the attack al-Qaeda claimed full credit for the blasts and promised the attacks would keep coming until all foreign combat troops left Somalia.

It didn’t take long for bin Laden’s followers to make good on their threat of further strikes against the U.S.-backed coalition; just 36 hours after the Ufeyn bombings, suicide bombers killed nearly 100 people in an assault on the British embassy in Mogadishu. And the casualty toll might have been even higher had not Royal Marines sniper teams succeeded in taking out two would-be bombers before they could detonate their charges at the British ambassador’s office. When word of the embassy attack reached London, it sparked cries of outrage from the British people and pledges by then-Prime Minister John Major that the perpetrators of the attack would be “hunted down to the very ends of the earth”.

Leading that hunt would be the counterintelligence service MI- 5, which since the end of the Cold War had been shifting its primary focus from combating espionage to overseeing counterterrorism actions on British soil. MI-5’s leadership was convinced that the perpetrators of the embassy bombing had gotten help from collaborators living in the UK, and they were determined to unmask those collaborators before any more British diplomatic facilities in Somalia were bombed. Before the first bombing victim’s funeral had been held the agency had sent two teams of field operatives to comb the Somali community in London for any sign of the bombers’ accomplices, while a third team ventured into Somalia itself to look for their sponsors.

They didn’t have to wait long before their investigative efforts began to bear fruit. On September 22nd, twelve days after John Major’s address to Parliament on the embassy bombing, a cousin of one of the co-conspirators in the bomb plot anonymously contacted Scotland Yard to disclose the existence of a workshop in the suspect’s garage which was being used to forge identity papers which were intended to enable future would-be bombers to get into British government installations without arousing too much suspicion from security personnel. Within a matter of hours, warrants had been issued by Scotland Yard to search the garage and the adjoining house for further evidence that could tie its owners to the bomb attacks on the British embassy in Mogadishu.

Realizing their operational security had been compromised, the remaining accomplices to the bomb plot hastily tried to cover up their tracks only have their haphazard attempt at damage control backfire; instead of throwing police off the collaborators’ scent, it led those police right to their doorstep. By September 26th most of the London collaborators with the Mogadishu embassy attack conspiracy were either in police custody or being actively pursued across Great Britain as fugitives. Back in Mogadishu itself the third MI-5 team used the data obtained by the other two teams and by Scotland to home in on the men who’d put up the money and the technical know-how which had made the embassy bombings possible. After that, the decision fell to Major and his senior military and security advisors as to what course of action should be pursued to bring the conspirators to justice and neutralize the threat they still posed to Britain.

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That was where the SAS came in. As perhaps the most effective and highly motivated of all the special operations units in the British armed forces, and having a long history of successful operations in the Middle East and North Africa, they were ideally suited for the job of rounding up the embassy bomb plot ringleaders-- or, if necessary, liquidating them. In any case they went into Somalia with the starkly clear understanding those ringleaders could not be permitted to roam free another minute. The members of the detail assigned to carry out what was officially designated Operation Fishnet were especially well suited for the task at hand; they were all veterans of either the Gulf War or of anti-terrorist operations in countries with terrain similar to Somalia’s, and at least one member of the Fishnet team was also a
fluent Arabic and Somali speaker with extensive supplemental training in counterintelligence.

They went in late on the evening of September 29th local time, inserted into the target area via parachute drop from a C-17 cargo jet on loan from the U.S. Air Force. Aided by CIA satellite images and a local guide familiar with the neighborhood in question, the SAS men located the bomb plotters’ hideout within a matter of minutes;
thanks to a combination of expert planning, knowledge of the habits of the fighters guarding the compound, and sheer good luck the SAS team was able to catch the plotters by surprise. One of them was shot and killed when he tried to resist capture-- but he was a conspicuous exception, as the other plotters were subdued in short order before being spirited away to a waiting helicopter.

Back in Washington, Gore hoped the success of the SAS mission and his decision to assist London in carrying it out would yield some political dividends for him at home. He’d already declared himself as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1996, and a success in Somalia would give him a major boost going into the start of the primary season. It was a boost he sorely needed: as American casualties in the Somali theater steadily mounted over the first two- plus years of Operation Hope, the commander-in-chief had come under increasing criticism for his handling of the Somali conflict. Some of the more extreme critics of the administration were even calling for Gore to be impeached. One of those critics, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, accused Gore of plunging the United States into a needless and costly overseas adventure whose only possible purpose in his eyes was to divert public attention away from the morass Gore’s administration had made of things at home-- a charge Gore and his supporters heatedly denied. The staunchly left-wing magazine The Nation labeled him as “an opportunistic war-monger serving the interests of Wall Street instead of the interests of the people”; this accusation would also provoke a sharp denial from the White House.

Potential voters largely took Gore’s side in the matter-- an ABC News/Gallup poll released in the first week of October showed his approval ratings, which had threatened to drop below 60 percent before the SAS mission, now inching back up towards the 70 percent mark. And they would get still higher as the 1996 New Hampshire primaries drew
near...

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