Journalist Abdel Bari Atwan visited Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan for a few days, starting on November 23, 1996. “Bin Laden told me that his Afghan Arabs had been involved in the [October 3-4] 1993 ambush on American troops in Mogadishu, Somalia. He described how the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid had been blamed. ‘But he denied responsibility, and he was telling the truth about that,’ bin Laden said. ‘There were successful battles in which we inflicted big losses on the Americans, and we preyed on them in Mogadishu.’ He said he thought the US had displayed a singular lack of courage by pulling out of Somalia immediately afterwards.”
– Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of al Qaeda, Page 36