Mohamed Farrah Aidid

...

Aidid was somebody who was in, in a conflict with another faction of, um, of Somali people.

And, and I think it was in, uh-

That's the Mo- that's the Mogadishu thing back in '94 and '95 and all that, right?

A matter of fact, if somebody came into his office and he tried to treat that patient, he'd go to jail.

So listen to this guy and what he's trying to sell here today.

You're gonna find out that this guy is not what he says he is.

He is actually selling, uh, the best con I think I've ever seen.

This is the first round of that, and I can't wait to talk more about that.

... that justice is definitely coming.

Omar today, Mamdani tomorrow.

Mike Davis, Article 3, where do folks go to, uh, to find out what you guys are working on, and your social media, sir?

Uh, because they, they explained to us real quick what we were gonna do was gonna be try to hunt down the leadership of the Somali National Alliance that was opposing the UN and the US effort in Somalia.

We were gonna try to take out their leader, Mohamed Aidid, and, and track him down.

And they, and they basically ran us through that real quick, and they said, "Well, let's go live fire hitting a target." And again, we, we had just gotten off the plane, just gotten off the bus.

So we had to take a little bit of a step back, kinda get those two cultures to align because, uh, while, while they are extremely proficient and extremely flexible, the Ranger regiment's very proficient, but we got young guys.

On October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, putting the first artificial satellite in orbit and terrifying a whole bunch of people in Washington, D.C. And on October 4th, 1993, the two-day Battle of Mogadishu, which is, was later memorialized in the book and film Black Hawk Down, ended.

The battle began with a calamitous US/UN mission to capture a couple of aides to self-declared Somali President Mohamaf- Mohamed Farrah Aidid, uh, which went very sou- [chuckles] very south very quickly when Somali fighters shot down a US Black Hawk helicopter.

They later shot down a second.

In the end, 21 international soldiers were killed, 19 of them American, and one captured, while at least 200 Somalis, both civilians and militants, were also killed.

We are in our seventh month of war.

And it's interesting because today is, by the way, the 33rd anniversary of the Battle of Mogadishu, which if any of you have seen the movie Black Hawk Down, which I just watched the other day to refresh my memory, was a special operations task force brought to, um, bought to Somalia in order to capture Mohammed Farah Aidid, U.S. citizen, by the way, or actually was his son a U.S. citizen, but I believe he was a U.S. resident, went back to Somalia, became a warlord, and was taking all of the food during a U.N. famine.

During a famine, the United Nations was supplying food, the United States was supplying food, but warlords were ruling Somalia.

Technically, that's settled down quite a bit, but their big problem now is Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups like ISIS, that are still ISIS, Al-Qaeda, that are still operating inside of Somalia.

On October 3, 1993, U.S. Army Rangers, Delta Force operators, and helicopter crews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment launched a daylight raid into the Bakarta Market area of Mogadishu, Somalia.

The mission, part of Operation Gothic Serpent under Task Force Ranger, aimed to capture two lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid.

The operation was expected to take under an hour.

Within minutes of the assault, the plan unraveled.

I'm at home now, but if we were in my office, I have on my wall one of my proudest things, which is an arrest warrant issued by the United Nations, believe it or not, in Mogadishu in 1993, when I was documenting some of the violations committed by UN forces and their response to...

My complaint was that I should be arrested for supporting the propaganda efforts of the United Somali Congress, which was the militia of the late General Aidid, whom I was also accusing of war crimes.

That's another story.

All right.