Aidid has been in hiding since June, after an ambush in which his troops killed 23 Pakistani soldiers–members of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Somalia. Flight hasn’t blunted the warlord’s sting; four American soldiers were killed on Aug. 8 by a bomb apparently detonated by his militia, and early last week six GIs were wounded by another remote-control explosion. Washington ordered 400 army rangers to reinforce the 1,200 American combat troops already on station. The Defense Department claimed that the deployment was “not an effort to go after one man.” But Pentagon sources told NEWSWEEK that the reinforcements included a small contingent of commandos from Delta Force, the army’s elite counterterrorism unit. The snatch is one of their special-ties. Backed up by as many as 20 special-operations helicopters, the Delta Force contingent will be ready to grab Aidid–if only he can be found.
An arrest probably isn’t imminent. “Unless we get lucky, the chances of picking him up are pretty slim,” says a Pentagon source. U.S. officials say they don’t have good intelligence on Aidid’s whereabouts and don’t have much hope of getting any. The CIA has “assets” in Somalia, but evidently they have not been able to penetrate Aidid’s inner circle or pinpoint his location long enough for an effective military operation to be mounted. And south Mogadishu has become so dangerous that CIA officers have trouble recruiting new agents or even meeting with the ones they’ve already signed up. The $25,000 reward put up by the United Nations hasn’t helped. The offer was clumsily made on yellow WANTED posters, asking anyone who could capture Aidid to bring him to Gate 8 of the U.N. compound, where crowds of Somalis often wait for part-time jobs. “In retrospect, it was stupid to think that anyone would turn in Aidid,” admits a U.N. official in Mogadishu. “That would invite a clan war for years to come.”
Many members of Aidid’s Habr Gedir subclan romanticize him as a patriot who rose from desert nomad to poet and statesman, survived six years in jail under the hated dictator Mohamed Siad Barre-and then led the military coalition that drove Siad Barre from the country last year. “The uneducated Habr Gedir view him as a hero,” says Mohammed Aden Guled, editor of a Mogadishu newspaper and a member of the subclan. “But if you ask, ‘Has he built roads? Schools? Hospitals? What has he done?’ they cannot answer.”
Aidid is hiding behind his own people, surrounded by noncombatants. American officials worry that an attempt to capture him will cost many innocent lives. They fear that Aidid himself might be killed in the process, making him a martyr and violating a U.S. prohibition against assassination. “That prospect really gives us goose pimples,” says a Defense Department official. And even if Aidid can be taken alive, there’s another question to which U.S. officials have no satisfactory answer. Asks one: “What do we do once we’ve got him?”
U.S. foreign policy has a history of personalizing issues, treating allies as heroes and adversaries as villains. Originally Aidid was an American friend; he was praised to the skies and had his picture taken with Robert Oakley, the special envoy who oversaw the early stages of the U.S. intervention. Then Aidid began to trade punches with the peacekeepers and suddenly went from useful chum to all-purpose bad guy, much like Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama.
The United States may have put too much emphasis on Aidid’s troublemaking. In most of Somalia, the peacekeeping effort is making steady progress. U.N. relief operations are about to wind up. Health clinics are functioning, farmers are growing crops again and, in the countryside, banditry has been reduced to a minor problem. “There are no organized militia attacks going on anywhere outside of south Mogadishu,” says David Shinn, the State Department’s special coordinator for Somalia.
Yet it’s south Mogadishu, and Aidid with it, that seems to be obsessing the Pentagon, too. In a speech last Friday, Defense Secretary Les Aspin set out a new raft of objectives that the American forces in Somalia hope to reach; they include stripping Somali warlords of their heavy weapons and setting up “credible police forces” in major population centers. Those won’t be easy tasks. But nabbing Aidid remains the top priority. Aspin called him “a major challenge to the whole U.N. enterprise” and warned that unless the warlord is taken out of the picture, “the situation will return to what existed before the United States sent in the troops.” How long will it take to neutralize Aidid? No one knows. U.S. officials are predicting that the GIs will be stuck in Somalia through 1994. Not catching Aidid by then is too embarrassing for the Pentagon even to contemplate.
