President Clinton approved Operation Gothic Serpent after three bomb attacks on American forces in August 1993 killed four military policemen and wounded ten more soldiers. The 441-person Task Force Ranger, led by Major General William F. Garrison, was an assembly of the U.S. military's most elite units: B Company of the 75th Ranger Regiment, C Squadron of Delta Force, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment with its Black Hawks and Little Birds, Navy SEAL operators from DEVGRU, and pararescuemen from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron. Intelligence came from a joint CIA and Intelligence Support Activity effort. Crucially, TF Ranger operated under JSOC and received orders directly from CENTCOM, not from the UN command structure or from the U.S. general commanding American forces in Somalia. This parallel chain of command would have consequences.

The task force occupied an old hangar at Mogadishu's airport, living in construction trailers without potable water. Mortar attacks on the compound became routine. Between late August and late September, the force executed a series of raids: an old Russian compound on September 6, the Jialiou police station on September 14, Radio Mogadishu on September 17. On September 21 they captured Osman Atto, Aidid's chief financier, after intelligence operatives had given Atto a cane containing a hidden tracking beacon. Delta operators followed his vehicle convoy by helicopter and disabled his car with shots to the engine block, marking the first known takedown of a moving vehicle from the air. Garrison had the 160th SOAR fly sorties with soldiers aboard multiple times daily, varying insertion and extraction methods to prevent the militia from reading the patterns. But Aidid himself remained hidden, no longer appearing in public.

On the afternoon of October 3, intelligence placed two of Aidid's lieutenants at a location in the neighborhood Mogadishans called the Black Sea. The task force deployed 19 aircraft, 12 vehicles, and 160 operators. The targets and 22 others were captured quickly and loaded onto a ground convoy. Then the situation disintegrated. Armed militiamen and civilians converged from across the city. An RPG brought down Black Hawk Super Six One, killing both pilots on impact. A second helicopter, Super Six Four, was downed shortly after. At the Super Six Four crash site, pilot Michael Durant and his surviving crew could not move. Two Delta snipers, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, volunteered repeatedly to be inserted at the site. When a relief column from the airport was ambushed and turned back, they were finally granted permission. Gordon and Shughart fought to defend the crash survivors until they were overwhelmed and killed. Both received the Medal of Honor posthumously. Durant was captured and held for eleven days.

A rescue convoy of nearly 70 vehicles was assembled, bolstered by Malaysian, Pakistani, and American conventional forces under UNOSOM II. Pakistani M48 Patton tanks from the 19th Lancers, soldiers of the Royal Malay Regiment, and infantry from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division fought through hours of heavy combat to reach the trapped operators and extract them. By dawn on October 4, the battle was over. Eighteen Americans had been killed and 85 to 97 wounded, an estimated 70 percent casualty rate. Dozens of UNOSOM troops were also killed or wounded. Somali casualties, which included both militia fighters and civilians caught in the crossfire, were estimated at 314 killed and 812 wounded, though figures vary widely. It was the most intense close combat American troops had experienced since Vietnam.

Task Force Ranger was withdrawn from Somalia later in October. All American forces left by March 1994. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin resigned, blamed for denying armor support that might have reached the trapped soldiers sooner; political leaders had feared tanks would undermine the mission's peacekeeping image. The battle's consequences radiated outward for years. American reluctance to intervene in Somalia led the CIA to rely on warlord proxies against the Islamic Courts Union in the 2000s and drove U.S. support for Ethiopia's 2006 invasion. Osama bin Laden cited the American withdrawal as evidence of vulnerability. The human cost extended beyond the combatants: the pullout ended the humanitarian operation that had been rescuing Somalia from famine. For Mogadishu's residents, the battle was one chapter in a civil war that would continue for decades, fought over streets they still had to live on.