Mohamed Farrah Aidid

Mohamed Farrah Aidid was the warlord who broke Somalia's government and then made the country ungovernable by anyone else, including the United Nations. He was a Habr Gidr Hawiye, trained as a soldier in Italy and the Soviet Union, and served Siad Barre as a general and as ambassador to India - having first spent six years in one of Barre's prisons on suspicion of plotting against him. He led the United Somali Congress forces that drove Barre out of Mogadishu in January 1991, and then split with Ali Mahdi Muhammad over which of them had inherited the state. The fighting between their factions destroyed the capital street by street through 1991 and 1992, wrecked the harvest, and produced the famine that brought the cameras and then the Americans. Aidid read the UN relief operation as a rival administration rather than a humanitarian one, which was not an unreasonable reading of a mission that had begun talking about disarming him. In June 1993 his militia ambushed and killed twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers, the Security Council put a price on his head, and the hunt for him culminated on 3 October 1993 in the raid that lost two American helicopters and eighteen soldiers in a night's fighting in the Bakara market. Several hundred Somalis died in the same battle. The political effect was the opposite of the military one: the United States announced its withdrawal within days, the UN followed, and Aidid declared himself president of a country that did not recognise him. He was shot during factional fighting in Mogadishu in July 1996 and died of his wounds, and his son Hussein, a US Marine reservist who had returned to Somalia with the intervention, was chosen to succeed him. The Security Council resolution naming him was the first time the UN had authorised the arrest of a specific individual. Somalia had no functioning central government for the next fifteen years. The American withdrawal also shaped the refusal to intervene in Rwanda eighteen months later, which is the longest shadow the episode cast.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history