VIDEO: "Allahu akbar!" in the Horn of Africa

Well, that does it! Somalia is off Walt's bucket list! The Liido Restaurant (pictured) in Mogadishu, the shithole's capital, serves excellent mystery-meat burgers, but enjoying one on the beach could cost you your life. Time for the latest news from Liido Beach, followed by a history lesson.

The news today is that at least 32 people were killed in a suicide attack at the popular beach, carried out by al-Shabaab militants. Hassan Ben-Sober [Ed., please check name], a police spokesthingy, told the meeja that "around 63" people were also wounded, some of them critically.

Video footage showed a number of bodies and injured people in Mogadishu's Abdiaziz district. Al-Shabab controls large parts of southern and central Somalia. The group is affiliated to al-Qaeda and for two decades has waged a brutal insurgency against a government backed by the Disunited Nations.

If you (like 99.99% of Americans) have forgotten about Somalia, let me remind you that the government of William Jefferson Clinton (Democrat) sent American troops there to wage peace in the 1990s as part of a UN snafu known as "Operation Gothic Serpent".

Mogadishu was the site of the infamous "Black Hawk Down Incident", of 3-4 October 1993, part of the Battle of Mogadishu, between forces of the US of A against the forces of the so-called Somali National Alliance (SNA) and armed irregulars. The battle was part of the then two-year-old Somali civil war, just one of the Muslim civil wars in which America has foolishly intervened. 

The UN initially sent troops to alleviate the famine of 1992, but then began trying to restore a central government, establish democracy, yada yada yada. In June of 1993, UN peacekeepers suffered their deadliest day in decades when the Pakistani contingent was attacked while inspecting a SNA weapons storage site. That's what happens when you look into the barrel.

UNOSOM II (the UN task force) blamed SNA leader Mohammed Farah Aidid and launched a manhunt. In July, American forces raided the Abdi House in search of Aidid, killing many elders and prominent members of Aidid's clan. Big mistake, Dr Jones! The raid led many Mogadishu residents to join the fight -- not on "our" side -- and in August, Aidid and the SNA deliberately attacked American personnel for the first time. And that's why slick Willy dispatched Task Force Ranger to sort things out.

On 3 October 1993, US forces planned to seize two of Aidid's top lieutenants during a meeting deep in the city. The raid was only intended to last an hour, but morphed into an overnight standoff and rescue operation extending into the daylight hours of the next day. Here's the trailer for the slightly biased movie version of what happened.

What really happened was this. As the battle progressed (or not), Somali forces used RPGs to shoot down three American Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. Two of them crashed deep in hostile territory (read: anywhere in the city). A desperate defence of the two downed helicopters began and fighting lasted through the night to defend the survivors of the crashes. In the morning, a UNOSOM II armored convoy fought their way to the besieged soldiers and withdrew, incurring further casualties but rescuing the survivors.

No battle since the Vietnam War claimed so many American casualties -- 18 dead and 73 wounded. You won't see much about the other forces in the movie, but Malaysian forces suffered one death and seven wounded, and Pakistani forces had two injured. Somali casualties were far higher -- between 133 and 700 dead.

The part that really wasn't a good look for the Clinton government was that, after the battle, dead American soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by enraged Somalis, in full view of a vast [or half-vast. Ed.] TV audience.

The UN gave up on Somalia in 1995, and, as today's news illustrates, the state is now a lawless and dangerous shithole, with no effective government -- a place to be avoided like the plague (which is said to be present there). Fear of another PR disaster kept the US government from increasing its involvement in Somalia and other regions. 

Some students of history (Republicans perhaps) say that what is now called "Somalia Syndrome" influenced the Clinton administration's decision not to intervene in the Rwandan genocide. However, the lesson of Somalia was apparently forgotten when new Muslim civil wars broke out in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.