THE crackle of automatic gunfire echoes through the potholed streets where donkey carts deliver water, firewood and qat, a mild narcotic chewed by the city’s militiamen.

“OK, we have some small gunshots here but they are for no good reason,” said Ibrahim Isaac Yerow, until recently an assistant minister in Somalia’s faltering, fledgeling Government, as he sipped coffee outside the disused grain warehouse where the parliament meets. “And if someone is shooting for a reason, then we will deal with it.”

The streets of Baidoa are filled with red-eyed militiamen holding AK47s in one hand and bags of qat in the other. The town is home to a government in crisis, rocked by thirty-six resignations in the past nine days and hemmed in on all sides by militias linked to Somalia’s dominant Islamic courts.

Mogadishu, the capital long regarded as one of the most dangerous places on the planet, is undergoing something of a renaissance since the Islamists seized it from a hated alliance of American-backed warlords in June. They have managed to reduce the number of guns on the streets and discourage people from chewing qat. Its port is expected to resume operations this month and last week its airport reopened to commercial flights, allowing residents to travel directly to the shoppers’ paradise of Dubai. In contrast, the airstrip at Baidoa is used only by the United Nations and twice-daily flights bringing qat from Kenya.

Yesterday the Government was hit by two more resignations, leaving Ali Mohamed Gedi, the Prime Minister, looking increasingly isolated over his refusal to negotiate with the Islamists. The Government’s response is: “Crisis? What crisis?”

Mohamed Abdi Hayir, the Minister of Information, said: “There is no political crisis. We still have more than half our full ministers left.” He said that the resignations were a show of democracy in action.

Somalia has been without a functioning central government since 1991. More than a dozen attempts to build peace in the lawless land have ended in failure. The latest government was formed in a Nairobi sports hall in 2004 before moving to its grain warehouse, about 150 miles (240km) northwest of the capital, in February.

Since then militias allied to the Supreme Council of Somalia have taken the capital and a swath of central and southern regions. They have imposed Sharia — sentencing rapists to death by stoning, and banning Western films — and are accused of sheltering al-Qaeda suspects.

Last month they moved to within 20 miles of Baidoa, prompting Ethiopia to send troops across the border in support of the beleaguered Government. That was enough to scupper peace talks planned in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, as each side accused the other of aggression.

Last week a minister was shot dead as he left a mosque and every day brings more government resignations.

Mr Yerow said that it was time for the Prime Minister to go after narrowly surviving a vote of no-confidence. “Peace is a fundamental need for the Somali people but the Prime Minister is dragging his feet over peace talks,” he said.

John Prendergast, of the International Crisis Group, said that the transitional parliament was fast losing any pretence of representing Somalia’s population. “As more and more of these guys resign, the more the executive branch of the Government is collapsing before our eyes and becoming just President Yusuf and his allies, backed by Ethiopia,” he said by telephone from Washington.

“It is becoming an almost irrelevant political force but that doesn’t diminish at all the military capacity, by virtue of their alliance with Ethiopia.” Residents of Baidoa are left feeling uneasy about their proximity to an unpopular government.

Ibrahim Mohamed Ali, 28, an unemployed electrician, said: “The town is the base of the Government and so we always know that they [the Islamists] want this place.”

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