In 2002, Ghali studied at the main Tablighi Ja’maat mosque in France, located in the suburb of Saint-Denis, outside Paris. (This was the same suburb where French police would hunt down and kill the Islamic State terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the architect of the November 13, 2015, attacks.) Later that year he visited the movement’s complex of mosques, madrassahs, and residential compounds near Lahore, in eastern Pakistan. Each November, four million people—the largest congregation of Muslims after the hajj—descend upon the complex for the three-day itjema, or gathering, sleeping on mats in a huge mosque, listening to a marathon of sermons, and praying in the streets. Life, he told Ansar upon returning home, “is like a waiting room in an airport when you are in transit,” a brief interlude before the “real journey” begins. “You had better be prepared,” he admonished Ansar, while reclining on pillows and thumbing through a copy of the Hadith.
By 2003, Ghali had begun to frequent a Salafi mosque in Bamako with ties to Tablighi Jama’at. One afternoon, Manny Ansar arrived there to find Ghali seated on a mattress in a small prayer room, a stubbly beard forming on his cheeks. Ansar looked at the cramped cubicles, the dirty mattresses, the bearded acolytes, and politely declined Ghali’s invitation to stay there for a four-day weekend. At this point, Ghali had given up his rich diet of lamb and couscous, his bespoke suits and his embroidered boubous. He seemed to subsist on nothing but milk and dates, and dressed in a white djellaba, a long Middle Eastern robe, and short trousers that ended well above his ankles, the clothes favored by fundamentalist Muslims. He had removed all the photographs and paintings from his house, made his wife wear the hijab, and kept her confined to the home. And he began giving away his prized possessions, handing an expensive Rolex watch to another former Tuareg rebel. Ghali confided to Ansar that he was saying “twice as many prayers” as those required by Islam, because “of all the things I have done that I regret.”
Ansar was mystified by his friend’s devotion but tried to remain open to it.
“You must not lose yourself entirely in religion,” Ansar told him. “You were the one who created these problems for the state and for the society, so you have to stay in charge, to maintain the peace.”
Ghali waved him off.
“He began to lose his friends, his acquaintances, and he became solitary. He entered a different world,” Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, a Tuareg former rebel and a singer-guitarist in Tinariwen, told me many years later.
“You know the Festival in the Desert is not something constructive. It won’t speak well for you before God after you are dead,” Ghali lectured Ansar. “You have to leave it behind, and consecrate yourself to God.” Ghali thrust into his hands a book written by a Salafi scholar about the proper way to pray. “Manny, you have to read this and respect it, and put into practice what you find,” he said. “You have to give yourself over to God, because you are a Muslim.”
“Leave me alone for five more years,” Ansar said. “Then I’ll stop everything and follow your advice.”
“No, no, that’s too late,” Ghali warned. “You don’t know if you’re going to die today.”
It was during this period of Iyad Ag Ghali’s religious transformation that El Para retreated with his hostages to the low-lying Adrar des Ifoghas massif of northern Mali. These were the same strongholds where Ghali had grazed herds of goats and cattle as a boy, where he had encamped as a Tuareg rebel in 1990, and near where he had held his 2000 Tuareg music festival, the precursor to the Festival in the Desert. “Iyad approached the German ambassador, and said, ‘I have the ability to make contact with the jihadis,’ ” recalled a former comrade. One of Ghali’s relatives, an Islamic scholar and imam in northeastern Mali, had become one of the first Tuaregs to join the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, and he might well have facilitated the contact between Ghali and the radicals—including the ringleader, El Para, the rickets-blighted Abou Zeid, and the one-eyed Belmokhtar, the last of whom did not participate in the kidnapping but, a consummate businessman, became involved in the ransom talks.
Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Touré, named Ghali the government’s intermediary with the jihadis, and, the comrade recalls, “The Germans gave him the vehicle to carry out the mission. Iyad found the kidnappers in the mountains, and they had a long parley.” Shortly after that encounter, German diplomats carried three suitcases filled with five million euros cash on a military plane to Bamako to deliver to the kidnappers. Ghali loaded the suitcases into a Land Cruiser and drove back to the kidnappers’ Saharan sanctuary. There, El Para and his men counted the money on a blanket in the sand. Ghali earned a new Land Cruiser for brokering the deal—and the trust of three of the region’s most fanatical jihadis. The hostages were released on August 17, 2003.
American officials were alarmed and outraged by the German government’s capitulation to El Para’s ransom demand. They believed that it had established a dangerous precedent. The Germans tried to keep the payment quiet, but, said Vicki Huddleston, the U.S. ambassador to Mali between 2002 and 2005, “everybody knew about it as soon as it happened.” Reports circulated that the GSPC had spent the money on weapons in Mauritanian gun bazaars, and on recruiting fighters for jihad.
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Nobody in Mali was sure how to counter the jihadi threat. Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Touré, was more concerned about the Tuareg rebels and shrugged off the growing presence of Islamic extremists in the Malian desert. A former army paratrooper who had brought down a military dictatorship in 1991, President Touré had quickly overseen a democratic transition and surrendered power to the civilian president, which earned him admiration around the world. As an elder statesman, he campaigned across Africa for the eradication of Guinea worm disease, a parasite that causes debilitating blisters all over the body. Since reentering political life and being elected the country’s president in 2002, he had become a close ally of the West, but seemed to believe that Mali could remain insulated from post-9/11 realities.
French military intelligence had closely tracked Mokhtar Belmokhtar and was well aware of his pull and capacity for violence. In 2002, according to Le Monde, the director of France’s Territorial Surveillance Directorate noted that Al Qaeda was in direct communication with Belmokhtar. French intelligence feared that Belmokhtar was helping the terrorist group recruit jihadis of North African origin living in France. But the French were scaling down their military activities in the Sahel. Aside from running a small training program for Malian officers at the Special Military Academy of Saint-Cyr, in Brittany, they embedded just a handful of French officers with Malian soldiers in the field, and maintained a small number of soldiers, including Foreign Legionnaires, in base camps in the Sahel. The French ambassador to Mali did not believe that the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat constituted much of a threat, according to Vicki Huddleston. He appeared far more worried, she said, about the U.S. government’s increasingly aggressive attempts to project its military influence in the region.
General Chuck Wald, the hard-charging deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, was leading those efforts. In a series of meetings at the European Command headquarters in early 2003, Wald and his top aides assembled a “family tree” of suspected jihadis on the Algerian-Malian frontier. “We wove them all together,” Wald recalled a decade later. “We had names, relationships, and how they contacted one another.” Belmokhtar was considered the most dangerous figure on the list.
Wald and his deputies believed that they had an opportunity to destroy the jihadi threat in the Sahel before it metastasized into something much more pernicious. The Americans, including officials from the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, considered round-the-clock aerial surveillance of the fighters from manned aircraft, a Special Forces raid on their training camp, even bombing the group from a B-52. Wald liked the destruction wreaked by the big planes, which can carry up to seventy thousa
nd tons of bombs. In Afghanistan ten B-52s had inflicted eighty percent of the damage to Taliban positions in the first three months of the war. But he was aware that the attack would likely be perceived as overkill. Wald ultimately settled on a strike using Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can hit a target with accuracy from six hundred miles.
First however, they would have to secure the approval of Vicki Huddleston, the recently arrived ambassador to Mali. Wald called Huddleston on a secure phone line, told her he was “concerned” about Islamic militants operating in northern Mali, and said he would send down two deputies to Bamako to brief her. Days later, the men, both high-ranking military officers, were ushered into a secure room at the U.S. embassy. Huddleston and her country team—the defense attaché, USAID director, head political officer, and deputy chief of mission—gathered around the satellite photographs that they had spread out on a table. Huddleston scrutinized the images—about ten rows of men, one hundred fighters in all, the rifles, the horses, a handful of SUVs around the perimeter, and the desert setting.
“What are they doing?” Huddleston asked.
“They’re training,” a deputy replied.
“What are they training for?”
“We don’t know.”
“Well, what’s the plan?” Huddleston asked.
“We would like to remove them.”
As Huddleston remembered the conversation, Wald’s deputies specifically stated that they planned to launch a missile at the fighters, whom they labeled “really bad guys”; Wald insists that it was presented to the ambassador as one of several options. The deputies also said, Huddleston claims, that Wald was not willing to give the Malian government advance warning of the attack. Wald suspected that radical Islamist sympathizers had penetrated President Touré’s circle, and that they would leak the information about the impending air strike.
Huddleston considered the European Command’s request. A Colorado-born, former Peace Corps volunteer and a seasoned diplomat, Huddleston had run the U.S. interests section in Cuba and served as ambassador to Madagascar before arriving in Bamako in November 2002. She had also served as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince at the time of a coup d’état by the Haitian military that overthrew the country’s elected president, Jean-Paul Aristide, in 1994. As U.S. forces massed at Guantánamo Bay were preparing to remove the junta by force, Huddleston participated in negotiations between the Haitian coup leaders and a U.S. delegation, including former president Jimmy Carter and retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell, that led to the reinstatement of Aristide and averted an invasion. She was an advocate of restraint, dialogue, inclusion, and transparency, and she was troubled by Wald’s advocacy of a covert missile strike inside Malian territory. Huddleston also worried about civilian casualties. Given the distance between the closest possible launch site and the training camp, she calculated that the missile would take between thirty and sixty minutes to reach the target—enough time for innocents to wander into the kill zone. Moreover, she still hadn’t seen any evidence that the group was preparing a terrorist attack. Huddleston isn’t sure that Wald’s deputies ever confirmed the presence of Mokhtar Belmokhtar. But even if the deputies had identified the one-eyed jihadi as being among the fighters, Huddleston told me, she wouldn’t have approved his killing. “He was not associated at the time with the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat,” she recalled a decade later. “We knew him only as a bad guy who smuggled cigarettes.”
Huddleston pressed Wald’s deputies for specifics. “Tell me exactly who’s out there,” she demanded.
The deputies admitted that they had no idea. “But give us your approval and we’ll work on it.”
She sent them back to Vaihingen with a message for Wald: “I don’t want you bombing them,” she said.
Wald was infuriated. Huddleston, he believed, had lost a golden opportunity to eliminate the radical Islamist threat in a single air strike. Her opposition confirmed his impression that U.S. ambassadors in Africa focused too much on “soft” issues—nutrition, education, and health—and were out of step in a world of globalized terror. “There was a resentment that we [military types] were even hanging out in Africa,” Wald said. “The thinking was, ‘what are you mucking about my area for? You’re just going to mess it up.’ ” He also believed that the diplomatic corps was jealous of its military counterparts: four-star generals enjoyed easy access to many African leaders—“they love the U.S. military,” he said—while ambassadors sometimes had trouble getting a foot in the door. Still, he resigned himself to Huddleston’s decision overruling him. “We pushed it, but when the State Department says ‘you’re a bunch of assholes’ what are you going to do?”
For her part, Huddleston believed that Wald was something of a cowboy who was willing to act without considering the region’s complexities—or the possibility of blowback. “Wald doesn’t think,” she would say a decade later. “It is full speed ahead no matter what.” She felt vindicated a few weeks later, when U.S. intelligence revealed that the military drills had nothing to do with jihad. Belmokhtar had been training fellow Arabs for a battle against a rival Arab clan—the culmination of a long-running Hatfield–McCoy rivalry over water rights, representation on village councils, and other issues. Tribal chiefs had hired Belmokhtar to prepare their kinsmen for battle.
Just after the intelligence report clarifying the nature of Belmokhtar’s desert training came out, Wald left Germany on a scheduled visit to Bamako. He flew on his military plane from Stuttgart, first paying a courtesy call on Mali’s popular president, Amadou Toumani Touré. In the evening, Wald pulled up to Huddleston’s walled-off residence near the Niger River, a modern one-story villa surrounded by a garden filled with palm trees. Wald thought that Huddleston had gotten the “wrong impression” of him and wanted to ease the tension. “She didn’t know us well at the time,” he said. Fruit bats hung from the fronds of the palm trees in Huddleston’s garden, swirling around at twilight, swooping low over the swimming pool. Unkempt thickets of bamboo grew behind the verandah. The household staff cooked their meals on small fires in the back garden. Huddleston had filled the airy rooms with Bambara crocodile masks and elaborate wooden doors carved by Mali’s animist Dogon tribe—along with colorful folk art from Haiti that she had collected during her tour there.
“I guess you came to thank me,” Huddleston told the general. In her view, she had probably saved his job by vetoing the missile strike. Wald laughed, and little more was said on the subject.
Huddleston and Wald traveled north to Timbuktu in Wald’s plane the next morning, sitting across from each other on comfortable leather chairs in a private cabin. Wald was eager to see the Sahara, and assess the security situation there. The ambassador, slender, with brown hair cascading down below her shoulders, and the crew-cut general with a football player’s physique made an odd couple, with starkly different views on projecting America’s power in the world, but both agreed that northern Mali needed to be carefully monitored, and they found that they enjoyed each other’s company.
The jet followed the course of the Niger River, a strand of silver that wound through a pancake-flat, desolate landscape. A lot of places to hide out there, Wald thought. After two hours they descended toward Timbuktu. The military pilot circled twice, at low altitude, over warrens of flat-roofed, dun-colored buildings a few miles south of the river. Then they touched down on Timbuktu’s tarmac airstrip, to an official greeting from the mayor and many civil servants attired in turbans and flowing traditional Malian gowns.
Timbuktu was beginning a tourist boom, but Wald couldn’t help noticing how backward the place was: unpaved streets, tumbledown mud-brick houses, and, it seemed, many unemployed young men. He toured the Ahmed Baba Institute, the government library funded by UNESCO that, thanks to Abdel Kader Haidara, now contained one of the world’s largest collections of medieval Arabic manuscripts. Then Wald visited Timbuktu’s Djingareyber Mosque, a mud-walled trapezoid with two l
imestone minarets, designed and built by one of the medieval world’s great architects, Abu Es Haq Al Zaheli, in 1327 on a commission from Musa I, known as Mansa Musa, the emperor of Mali. In one of the three inner courts of the hulking fortress—influenced by the great pyramids of Egypt—the imam handed Wald an embossed business card on quality paper, with the holy man’s website printed beside his email address.
“Imam, you’ve got your own website?” Wald asked, surprised. Later, he spotted a cybercafé and remembered a conversation that he had recently had with Algerian intelligence officials: Algerian extremists, they had told him, recruited potential jihadis via the web in Internet cafés just like this one. Wald was startled to see that modern technology had reached one of the most remote corners of the world. Maybe we don’t know this area as well as we thought we did, Wald thought.
Though they disagreed over Belmokhtar, Huddleston and Wald collaborated successfully on a program to train soldiers in several Sahel countries to pursue El Para, the Algerian parachutist-turned-jihadi-kidnapper who had abducted the thirty-two Western hostages in the Sahara. As part of the Pan-Sahel Initiative, launched by the Office of Counterterrorism within the U.S. State Department in November 2002, the U.S. team gave the troops all-terrain vehicles and taught them how to track the kidnappers using such means as satellite telephone intercepts and on-the-ground intelligence. After collecting his ransom in August 2003, El Para had escaped from his mountain redoubt in northeastern Mali. Troops from Mali, Niger, and Chad, backed by U.S. on-the-ground intelligence and aerial reconnaissance, pursued the jihadi leader back and forth across the Sahara for months. Chadian rebels captured him in 2004 in the remote Tibesti Mountains in northern Chad and turned him over to Algeria, which convicted him of terrorism and locked him away for life for “creating an armed terrorist group and spreading terror among the population.”
But his two deputies, Belmokhtar and Abou Zeid, both fellow members of his jihadi organization who had participated with him in the hostage-for-ransom operation in the Algerian and Malian Sahara, remained at large. And U.S. intelligence had come to regard Iyad Ag Ghali as a double threat—a former Tuareg rebel who was capable of restarting the rebellion in northern Mali, and a potential bridge between the secular Tuareg rebels and the radical Islamists, both of whom were occupying the desert and sometimes smuggling drugs and other contraband together. Although Ghali was still ostensibly a Malian government security adviser and was close to the Malian president, “We knew he had close contacts with the Salafis,” said Huddleston. “We were concerned.”
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 9