The Fox Trot Center has, at some point or other, been home to a package store, a Somali sweets shop, a Jamaican restaurant, a tailor, a coin laundry, two places of worship (one called Praise Temple, another called Liberty Hall House of God), a barber shop, a convenience food mart, a community center and an Iraqi bread bakery.

This shopping complex has a Decatur address but is in that part of DeKalb County where Clarkston and Stone Mountain also converge in a mashup of many such strip malls that seem too down on their luck to merit renovation but still in good enough shape to avoid the wrecker’s ball.

You could call this area, just outside the Perimeter and north of Memorial Drive, a no-man’s land. But don’t. It’s an everyman’s land, a place that thrums to a world beat — Caribbean, East African, West African, Central Asian and Middle Eastern, mostly, but there are likely other international seasonings in this melting pot.

It is the perfect place to meet Nazifa Garib. You can find Nazifa’s Bakery at the far end of the Fox Trot Center. You can recognize the shop because there are usually cars pulling up regularly in front. Or, if you go before midday, just follow your nose to the smells of yeast and flour.

“Hello!” calls Nazifa, when you walk in. Her short, dark hair is tied in a kerchief, her eyes round and mirthful, her mouth pink with lipstick. “How did you hear about us? Would you like some flatbread? It’s $3 for four loaves; you can’t beat the price.”

She is, in her uniquely charming way, all over you — with a personality that fills her plain shop. Shelves stacked with plastic-wrapped bags of flatbread line one side of this small room that seems to have once been a cafe. There are some plastic-cloth-covered tables and a deli case, but the provisions here are the most basic: bread and bottled water.

But Nazifa sells it hard, and you bite. She hands you a package of bread, each loaf as big as a pizza crust, light in your hands, bubbly, floppy, still warm from the oven. “This is Iraqi bread,” she says. “We call it nan.”

“We call it nan, too,” says another customer, who identifies himself as a Kurd. Before long Nazifa is listing all the countries from Iran to India that eat some form of nan. She has customers who drive every week from Augusta to load up, Pakistani restaurants and Afghani markets around town that stock her product.

Nazifa excuses herself to talk to Baydaa Aburahman, a woman working in the small kitchen. Around her are bags of flour, steel work tables, an industrial dough mixer and a large, round tandoor oven. Aburahman bakes the bread on the walls of the tandoor, and when it first comes out it is crispy, crackly and likely to figure among the best things you’ve ever eaten. Nazifa will tell you how hard she’s worked on the bread to get the stretchiness, the saltiness, the sourness of it just right.

So, here’s the funny thing about Nazifa. She isn’t Iraqi. She’s Bosnian.

When I go back to interview her — and sit down with cups of tea and hot bread with za’atar olive oil and herb dip — Nazifa, 50, tells me her life story. A bookkeeper by trade, she worked in Baghdad as a young woman in the 1980s, before the Gulf War. “Back then it was a place of opportunity, with good jobs,” she said, particularly so for professional European Muslims such as herself.

She returned to Bosnia in the early ’90s and faced the worst of that country’s civil war, speaking of harrowing experiences that she asked me not to relate in this story. She helped protect the lives of two small children at one point, and after decades reconnected with them both on Facebook.

She arrived in the United States in 1996 as a war refugee. Her transition to American life wasn’t the smoothest. Within two years of arriving here, she was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer, which required extensive abdominal surgery.

She got a job in financial services, connected with Atlanta’s burgeoning Muslim community, and married an Iraqi-American who, as it turns out, had a bakery.

Nazifa first started helping out at the bakery, then she had half ownership in it. Eventually, when her marriage ended, she took over the bakery and changed its name, from Alosta Bakery to Nazifa’s Bakery.

Nazifa says that in her first year of sole ownership, sales have gone up 30 percent. Now she is looking for ways to expand beyond traditional customers from the nan-eating world. Which, as the crow flies, is close.

A stall at the Decatur Farmers Market earned her praise but it came to a quick end after another merchant there complained she was taking away too many of his customers. (Market manager Duane Marcus confirms this.) This season she may try a stall at the Peachtree Road Farmers Market.

I’m predicting huge success. You meet Nazifa once, and you want to like her bread. Then you taste it, and you love it.