SOMALIA: Mortar rounds hit a packed market in Mogadishu killing up to 9 people

Record ID: 352314

  • Title: SOMALIA: Mortar rounds hit a packed market in Mogadishu killing up to 9 people
  • Date: 28th September 2008
  • Summary: VARIOUS OF PEOPLE SITTING ON STAIRS TAKING COVER FROM FIGHTING
  • Embargoed: 13th October 2008 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Somalia
  • Country: Somalia
  • Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement
  • Reuters ID: LVA5XUUGE86U8GPS8BMZ4C7HP1JY
  • Story Text: Islamists fired mortars at Mogadishu airport on Saturday (Sept 27) and government troops fired back, leaving nine people dead in the clash, an airport worker and residents said.
    A worker at the airport told Reuters the Islamists fired the mortars shortly after a military plane carrying equipment for the African Union troops had landed.
    Government and Ethiopian troops at the nearby presidential palace responded by shooting in the direction from where the mortars were coming, hitting residential areas.
    Residents said nine people were killed and 10 injured.
    The conflict in strategically sensitive Somalia, which looks across the Gulf of Aden to the Middle East, has compounded tensions in the always volatile Horn of Africa region.
    Islamist insurgents are battling the Somali government and their Ethiopian military backers in a nearly two-year conflict that some are calling Africa's "Iraq".
    The mortar shells hit a packed Bakara market, killing up to 9 people.
    Ahmed Guled, a resident of Mogadishu, said government-fired shells hit the market, which lies in a densely-populated area considered a stronghold of the Islamist insurgents, in retaliation to a rebel attack on the International airport.

    "Bakara market is the only place in which we earn our daily living TFG (government forces) and AMISOM forces say they were attacked from Bakara market and they are destroying the only remaining economic source for the Somalis in Mogadishu, their aim is to kill many people and they know Bakara is the most populated place in Mogadishu, when mortar hits fifty or hundred people the result is death," Ahmed Guled said.
    After being chased away from their power-base, Mogadishu, Islamists launched an insurgency in early 2007 that has killed nearly 10,000 civilians and an unknown number of combatants.
    They have become increasingly bold in the last two months, stepping up attacks in the Somali capital and capturing the strategic southern port of Kismayu.
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