On 29 December 1992, a series of bombings targeted two hotels which housed United States Marines en route to deploy in Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope in Aden, Yemen.
The bombings are sometimes considered to be al-Qaeda's first attacks against the U.S. due to the connections that Islamic Jihad in Yemen, including its leader Tariq al-Fadhli, had to Osama bin Laden financially.
[3] The Yemeni government authorized the U.S. to use their country as a staging ground for UNOSOM I, the U.S.-led United Nations mission to provide and protect humanitarian relief in Somalia amid the civil war.
[5][6] Jamal al-Nahdi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in Yemen who served as the main operative in the bombings, intended the explosions to occur simultaneously.
[7][6] As Nahdi was laying the charges of his truck bomb in the parking lot of the Mövenpick, the detonator went off prematurely, tearing off most of his left hand while injuring his assistant and a security guard who was approaching their vehicle.
[2] The U.S. government announced the withdrawal of their remaining troops stationed in Yemen for Operation Restore Hope on 30 December, in part due to the bombings.
In March 1997, Bin Laden said, "With Allah’s grace, Muslims over there cooperated with some Arab mujahideen who were in Afghanistan… against the American occupation troops and killed large numbers of them," in an interview on CNN.
"[13] According to American author Simon Reeve in The New Jackals, the bombings were in some part planned by Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda's military chief at the time who was also involved in training anti-U.S. militants in Somalia.