The Battle of Mogadishu, otherwise known as the Day of the Rangers (which in Somali is “Maalintii Rangers”) and immortalized in the iconic Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down, occurred 22 years ago yesterday. The intense bout of combat, which lasted for one day between October 3 and 4 back in 1993, was fought as part of Operation Gothic Serpent between United States forces (consisting of mostly of U.S. Army Rangers from Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Delta Force, Air Force Combat Controllers, Air Force Pararescuemen, Navy SEALs and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment) and Somali militiamen who were loyal to a guy they hoped to will to be the leader of their struggling nation: Mohamed Farrah Aidid — a former Italian colonial police officer and Somali army officer who was educated in Rome and Moscow.

The elite U.S. military troops attempted to capture two of Aidid’s main military leaders (who were part of his Habr Gidr clan) while they met in the city. But not long into the mission, unthinkable disaster struck — armed civilian fighters and Somali militia shot down the Americans’ air element: two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. A new mission was immediately called in, and the crew that was shot down and now on the ground in the treacherous, hostile city of Mogadishu were the center of it — to get them the hell out of danger and out of Somalia.

The operation was supposed to take an hour.

It wound up being an all night standoff.

At the end of it, 18 American troops were killed and 73 were wounded. One helicopter pilot and a Naval Corpsman were captured.

If you want to read more about the fight from someone who was there, click here and check this out.

Or, watch the following videos:

** – If you’d like to discover the “sliver of truth”, read below the videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVPEJ_CE82M

**If you want your mind blown, however, take a minute to digest this harrowing fact: the man who served as the crux of the conflict, the guy who invoked the coup d’etat and who Somali militia and armed civilians slaughtered American troops over — the aforementioned Mohammad Farrah Aidid, the leader of the Somali National Alliance (SNA) — yeah, his son? His blood? His young baby boy?

His son — the man who would a few years later take over for him when he died in 1996 — is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps.

Hussein Mohammed Farrah Aidid.

farrah aidid

The man, the cause of all the American bloodshed that was so tragic that it was famously depicted in a hot ticket Hollywood film, all along had a son that just a few years prior had served in Desert Storm as a member of the U.S. military. In fact, just a few months before the aforementioned battle, Hussein had taken part in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia because he was only the troop who could speak Somali and serve as a translator.

After being chosen by the SNA as his father’s successor (although he was not nationally recognized as such), the younger Aidid relinquished his role as leader and signed the Cairo Declaration in the winter of 1997, which proved to be a major milestone in established peace in the impoverished African country.

In the years following the peace accord, Hussein Mohammed Farrah Aidid would go on to serve as a trusted ally to the United States. In particular, George W. Bush. In 2001, in the wake of the September 11, he outed to POTUS a number of Islamic extremist sympathizers and loyalists to the most wanted man in the world at the time: Osama bin Laden.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise, however. He’s a registered Republican.