African Union lays siege to Al Shabab-controlled market in Somalia's capital

African Union troops aim to deny the militant Islamist group Al Shabab funds it receives from taxing shopkeepers and traders. An apparent surge of AU peacekeepers is challenging Al Shabab's tacit control of Somalia.

• 

Peacekeepers from the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) park their tanks near the main Bakara market during fighting between Somalia government soldiers and Islamist insurgents in the capital Mogadishu, on May 23.

Feisal Omar/Reuters

Enlarge

---

1Share 1 and 25

By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer / May 23, 2011

Johannesburg, South Africa Even in Somalia, the best way to shut down a terrorist group is to go after the money.
Skip to next paragraph

Recent posts

• 05.23.11
  African Union lays siege to Al Shabab-controlled market in Somalia's capital
• 05.22.11
  Taking care of business in South Sudan
• 05.20.11
  South Africa's ANC retains control in local elections, but grip is slipping
• 05.20.11
  A sometime war reporter reflects on Anton Hammerl's death in Libya
• 05.18.11
  Violence in Congo: What do we see when we take a step back?

Related Stories

• New semiautonomous region in Somalia vows to fight Al Shabab
• Kenya and Uganda boost security after grenade blast linked to Al Shabab
• Somalia terrorist activity in US raises concerns, questions

This morning, an African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia is hemming in Somalia’s powerful Al Shabab militia – a group that has paid allegiance to Al Qaeda – inside Somalia’s largest marketplace, the Bakara Market in Mogadishu. Al Shabab taxes the shopkeepers and traders of Bakara Market, using those proceeds to fund their operations. Al Shabab also controls the busy port city of Kismayo and derives income by taxing exports and imports that come through that port.
Together with the shaky but recently trained and rearmed troops of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, the African Union force – made up of 5,000 Ugandan troops and 3,000 Burundian troops – has increasingly taken territory away from Al Shabab and its allies, Hizbul Islam. In a statement this morning, AU spokesman Paddy Ankunda told reporters that the AU force would not enter Bakara Market, but instead would lay siege to the market in an effort to starve out Al Shabab.

Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.

"We crossed the Wadnaha road, al Shabaab's main route in, and we are at the edge of Bakara now," Reuters news agency quoted Mr. Ankunda as saying. "We do not want to enter Bakara, we want to lay siege to it."
In addition to denying tax revenues to Al Shabab, taking back Bakara Market would also put an end to Al Shabab’s use of the market as a base for military operations. Shabab fighters often launch mortar attacks from Bakara onto AU peacekeeper positions at the presidential palace compound, in hopes of provoking AU artillery retaliation into Bakara’s heavily populated areas.continued