Mohamed Farrah Aidid

At the time Aidid was serving as Lieutenant Colonel in the army with 26th Division in Hargeisa.

He was also the Head of Operations for the Central and Northern Regions of Somalia.

After the assassination, he was relieved of his duties and was recalled to Mogadishu to lead the troops guarding the burial of the deceased President.

Headquartered in Hargeisa, Brig Gen Aidid and Maj Gen Gallel would command the 26th Division on the Dire Dawa Front.

After the war, having served with distinction, Aidid worked as a presidential staffer to Barre before being appointed intelligence minister.

Mohamed Farrah Hassan Garad, known as General Aidid or Aideed (Maxamed Faarax Xasan Garaad, 'Caydiid Garaad'; محمد فرح حسن عيديد; 15 December 1934 – 1 August 1996) was a Somali general and diplomat.

Educated in both Rome and Moscow, he served as a chief in the Italian colonial police force and later as a brigadier general in the Somali National Army.

He would eventually become chairman of the United Somali Congress (USC), and soon after the Somali National Alliance (SNA).

Aidid was born in 1934 in the town of Beledweyne, Italian Somaliland.

He is from the Habar Gidir subclan of the greater Hawiye clan.

During the era of the British Military Administration he moved to Galkayo in the Mudug region to stay with a cousin, a policeman who would teach Aidid to both type and speak in Italian.

Soon after, during the period of the Italian ruled UN trusteeship, a young Aidid enlisted in the Corpo di Polizia della Somalia (Police Corps of Somalia) and in 1954 he was sent to Italy to be trained at an infantry school in Rome, after which he was appointed to work under several high ranking Somali police officers.

In 1958 Aidid would serve as Chief of Police in Banaadir Province, and the following year he returned to Italy to receive further education.

In 1960, Somalia gained independence and Aidid joined the newly formed Somali National Army.

He was promoted to lieutenant and became aide-de-camp of Maj. Gen. Daud Abdulle Hirsi, the first commander of the Somali National Army.

Requiring more formal training, Aidid, having been recognized as a highly qualified officer, was selected to study advanced post graduate military science at the Frunze Military Academy (Военная академия им. М. В. Фрунзе) in the Soviet Union for three years, an elite institution reserved for the most qualified officers of the Warsaw Pact armies and their allies.

In 1969, a few days after the assassination of Somalia's President Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, a military junta known as the Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC), led by Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, would take advantage of the disarray and stage a bloodless coup d'état on the democratically elected Somali government.

By November 1969, he had quickly fallen under suspicion by high ranking members of the Supreme Revolutionary Council, including Barre.

Without trial, he was subsequently detained in Mandhera Prison along with Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed for nearly six years.

Both Colonel Aidid and Yusuf were widely regarded to be politically ambitious officers, and potential figureheads in a future coup attempt.

Aidid claimed that his imprisonment was a result of encouraging President Barre to transfer power over from the Somali military to civilian technocrats.

Aidid was eventually released in October 1975, and he returned to service in the Somali National Army to take part in the 1977-1978 Ogaden War against Ethiopia.

During the war he was promoted to brigadier general and became an aide-de-camp to President Mohammed Siad Barre.

Under pressure from President Barre, Aidid gave a written guarantee in 1978 that Col Abdullahi Yusuf would not attempt a coup d'eat.

Yusuf would go on to break the pledge in a failed coup attempt and escaped to Ethiopia.

Aided was left stranded but was rescued by a high ranking ally in the regime, and was consequently saved from any punishment.

In 1979, Barre appointed Aidid to parliament, but in 1984, after perceiving him as a potential rival, sent him away to India by making Aidid the ambassador for Somalia.

He would use his time in the country to frequently attend lectures at the University of Delhi and with the aid of Indian lecturers at the University of Delhi, completed three books (A Vision of Somalia, The Preferred Future Development in Somalia and Somalia from the Dawn of Human Civilization to Today).

By the late 1980s, Barre's regime had become increasingly unpopular.

The State took an increasingly hard line, and insurgencies, encouraged by Ethiopia's communist Derg administration, sprang up across the country.

Being a member of the Hawiye clan, a high ranking government official and an experienced soldier, Aidid was deemed a natural choice for helping lead the military campaign for the United Somali Congress against the regime, and he was soon persuaded to leave New Delhi and return to Somalia.

Aidid defected from the embassy to India in 1989 and then left the country to join the growing opposition against the Barre regime.

Along with other armed opposition groups, he succeeded in toppling President Siad Barre's 22 year old regime following the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991.

Aidid possessed aspirations for presidency of the new Somali government, and would begin to seek alliances and unions with other politico-military organizations in order to form a national government.

Following the June 5, 1993 attack on the Pakistanis, the SNA—and by extension, Aidid—were blamed for the death of 25 UNOSOM II peacekeepers, causing him to become one of the first "Wanted Men" of the United Nations.

After the US-led July 12, 1993 Abdi House raid, which resulted in the death of many eminent members of his Habr Gidr clan, Aidid began deliberately targeting American troops for the first time.

President Bill Clinton responded by implementing Operation Gothic Serpent, and deploying Delta Force and Task Force Ranger to capture him.

The high American casualty rate of the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu on October 3–4, 1993, led UNOSOM to cease its four month long mission.

In 1995, Aidid declared himself president of Somalia.

He was killed the following year in Mogadishu on August 1, 1996.