Malaysian side quest in Somalia: rescue the Yankees from their own main quest.

**Context**: In October 1993, during the Battle of Mogadishu (yes, that one from Black Hawk Down) the U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force ran into a little problem: two Black Hawk helicopters shot down, surrounded in the middle of a city filled with very angry, very armed Somali militias. The Americans were pinned down for hours, outnumbered, outgunned, and basically living in the worst “escort mission” ever designed by God. Enter the UN peacekeepers, who technically weren’t supposed to be part of the U.S. operation at all. Among them were Malaysian soldiers from the 19th Battalion, Royal Malay Regiment, alongside Pakistani UN troops. They had one clear briefing: “Do not get involved in American firefights.” So naturally, they did the exact opposite. When they heard that the Rangers and Delta Force were stranded, the Malaysians said something along the lines of: “It’s probably a suicide mission. Let’s rock and roll.” Armed with Condor APCs and Pakistani tanks, the combined UN convoy drove straight into hell itself - Mogadishu at night, under constant RPG and small-arms fire, through narrow streets full of ambushes. The Malaysians led the way, providing armored cover for the Rangers and Delta operators to evacuate the wounded and retrieve the bodies of their comrades. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t pretty, but it worked. They pulled dozens of Americans out of the kill zone. At the end of it, 1 Malaysian soldier (Mat Aznan Awang) was killed, 7 Malaysians and 2 Pakistanis were seriously wounded, but the mission was a success: the Americans got out alive, because the Malaysians and Pakistanis didn’t back down. After the battle, the U.S. Army gave public recognition to the Malaysian and Pakistani units who saved them, though Hollywood kinda… forgot to include them in Black Hawk Down.

I remember one video on the Bosnian Genocide where a woman who survived the Srebrenica massacre called the Dutch her enemies because the UN Peacekeepers abandoned the safe zone to save their own skins.

On one hand you have NORDBAT and Jadotville, on the other the Dutch (Srebrenica) and this…

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