Somalia: Where bullets target the old and infants alike

Cradling her baby brother in stick-thin arms, eight-year-old Halima Mayow says little about the incident that wiped out their family in Mogadishu.But, at a camp on the outskirts of the Somali capital, the only word she does utter - “Mortar! Mortar!” - sums up the tragedy which has spawned two more orphans in this war-torn country.Halima Mayow and her baby brother lost their family in a mortar attack.A neighbour says a shell landed on the children’s family home at a slum in the Siisii area, north of the city.“It killed the father, the mother and three of the children,” Shamso Abdulle said.“We took these two children with us after their family was buried by the villagers.A human exodus“They will live with us because we don’t know where their relatives are and we couldn’t leave them there.”Intense fighting between forces in favour of the UN-backed government and radical Islamist guerrillas has triggered a human exodus from the bullet-pocked capital since the second week of May.The UN refugee agency says more than 100,000 people have been forced out of their homes during the recent bout of bloodletting.It leaves an estimated half a million internally displaced people languishing on the outskirts of the city.
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