Fatima Hashi says Somalia’s Bakara market has become slaughterhouse A Times Correspondent, Mogadishu

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"We always live in fear,” said Fatima Nuraddin Hashi, 49, a mother of five with her hair wrapped in a black veil. Fear is the natural emotion when you live in Bakara market, the bloody, beating heart of Mogadishu.

In this bustling commercial sprawl, money transfer agencies funnel in the diaspora dollars that fuel Somalia’s economy, exchange rates are set and imported goods unpacked.

Radio stations, newspapers, cyber cafes and phone companies make it Somalia’s premier rumour mill. It is also the city’s fuel depot, pharmacy, food store and gun market — one infamous part of Bakara is known as Irtogte, meaning “shot in the sky” since this is what buyers do to test the weapons.

Ragged streets run between bombed-out buildings daubed with violent graffiti. Wooden booths line the roads and business is brisk in everything and anything from onions to missile launchers.
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Bakara is in a part of the capital controlled by al-Shabaab. According to Roland Marchal, a Somalia expert at the Paris-based Centre for International Studies and Research, the group earns about £250,000 a month in taxes from major businesses in Bakara.

From Bakara, the extremists lob mortars at the few blocks of the capital held by the Government. In reply, residents say, the African Union peacekeepers (Amisom) fire back with little consideration for the civilians caught in between.

“My husband died two months ago when a mortar landed in the market,” Ms Hashi said. “He was eating in a restaurant. I am the only breadwinner now so I started to sell vegetables to earn some money to feed my children but it is not enough. Every day it is the same, we are attacked from every side: al-Shabaab tax us and Amisom shell us.”

Although she has no kind words for al-Shabaab fighters who harass and murder residents with impunity, she says that the peacekeepers are more deadly. “Amisom troops shell the market, mercilessly killing people. It starts when al-Shabaab targets the government areas, then Amisom retaliates.”

Mogadishu residents call everything that rains from the sky “mortars”. In October, however, witnesses reported that Amisom was using Soviet-made BM21 missile launchers to shell the market. “I have lost my husband, my son, a daughter and my niece in this market. For me it has turned into a slaughterhouse,” Ms Hashi said.