The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  One thought ran through Haidara’s mind.

  They’re going to break into our libraries, and steal everything inside, and destroy the manuscripts. What do we have to do to save them?

  While Haidara took refuge inside his family compound on the chaotic afternoon that he first came back to town, the “Bearded Ones” also arrived in the city. The radical triumvirate, one Malian Tuareg and two Algerian Arabs—Iyad Ag Ghali, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid—sitting side by side in a Toyota Land Cruiser, led a convoy of one hundred vehicles flying black jihadi flags. They took up positions across Timbuktu, put a stop to the looting, hoisted black banners in place of the Tuareg tricolors, and demanded that their secular Tuareg allies withdraw outside Timbuktu’s municipal boundaries. Outgunned and intimidated by their supposed partners, the secular Tuaregs grudgingly pulled out of Timbuktu, establishing bases at the port of Kabara five miles south of Timbuktu, and at the airport three miles outside town. Then, having quickly gained the upper hand, the jihadis announced themselves to Timbuktu’s apprehensive civilians.

  On the morning after the jihadis rolled into Timbuktu, a clerk at the Hotel Bouctou, a two-story establishment of limestone blocks with a wide rear terrace that faced the Sahara, urgently summoned the owner, Boubacar Touré, from his home. Once the Hotel Bouctou had been Timbuktu’s most popular drinking spot—a magnet for Western tourists, local guides, and trainers from the U.S. Special Forces. It was here, during a two-hour stopover in Timbuktu as a Newsweek correspondent in 1995, that I had first encountered Boubacar Touré, and here, eleven years later, that I had listened to the recorded music of Ali Farka Touré while noting the four U.S. Special Forces trainers discreetly drinking beer on the terrace. But by the spring of 2012, the hotel, like every other enterprise connected with Timbuktu tourism, had fallen on difficult times.

  Boubacar Touré, a gregarious man in his fifties, rushed over to the hotel, a five-minute drive from his home, and observed three Toyota Land Cruisers, black flags fluttering from their radio antennas, parked before the entrance. “Twelve bearded terrorists from all over the world—Pakistan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia—stood beside them,” Touré recalled a year later as we sat in plastic chairs in a sand plaza in front of the hotel, beside a thick grove of acacia trees, joined by members of his staff and friends. Behind the establishment, sand blew across a stark landscape of dunes, scrawny acacia trees, hobbled camels and domed cardboard-and-plastic tents, inhabited by resettled Tuareg nomads who were too poor to rent housing in the town.

  As Boubacar Touré stepped out of his vehicle on that first day of the occupation, he noticed a hunched figure carrying a black-and-gray Kalashnikov and protected by the scrum of bodyguards. The jihadi was under five feet tall, with a hawklike face and a black turban whose loose ends framed an unkempt graying beard. The weapon in his hands seemed comically large for a man of his childlike stature. In a voice barely louder than a whisper, he introduced himself as Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, the emir of Timbuktu. He was looking, he said, for a place to stay for him and his men.

  “Who are your clients?” Abou Zeid asked, cocking his head in a peculiar way.

  “We’ve worked with tourists, businessmen, government officials, whoever can pay,” Touré replied.

  “You mean you work with the whites?” Abou Zeid asked. “You work with the infidels?”

  Touré struggled to contain his resentment. Touré’s business had been near collapse for several years because of the drug running and kidnappings carried out by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. And since Al Qaeda militants had shot dead the German tourist in November 2011, and abducted three other Europeans, the hotel hadn’t had a single guest. “Mr. Abou Zeid, tourism has been ruined,” he said. “My employees and their families are hurting. You are kidnapping tourists, and you are killing them. What are you going to do about it?”

  “We’re going to see,” Abou Zeid muttered.

  Boubacar Touré knew that he should probably be more cautious. Abou Zeid was a murderer who had not only executed two Western hostages, but probably also killed many Muslim civilians in his native Algeria. But Touré refused to be intimidated by the terrorist leader and his gang of thuggish bodyguards. He had always been one to speak his mind, and he made the calculation that the Al Qaeda emir had no desire to alienate his new subjects immediately by murdering them. He also saw this face-to-face encounter as perhaps his only opportunity to extract what he could for years of hardship.

  “No, no, that’s not acceptable,” he told Abou Zeid, surprising himself with his temerity as he pressed the terrorist chief. He felt almost as if he were speeding down a road and couldn’t get off, gaining speed, exhilarated and heedless of the consequences. “Either you give me money to help the families of the people working here,” he said, voice rising, “or you find another solution.”

  Abou Zeid “stared and stared,” Touré recalled. Then, abruptly, he turned around, stepped back into the Land Cruiser, and stormed off with his entourage.

  The self-appointed emir of Timbuktu returned to the hotel the following day. On this visit he brought his partner, Iyad Ag Ghali, with him. They made a curious pair, Touré thought—the hunched and crippled Arab and the robust Tuareg, who towered over his Algerian counterpart. The new rulers surveyed the grounds, toured the corridors, and strolled through the restaurant, staring at its bottles of gin, vodka, and whiskey prominently displayed on shelves behind the bar. They had decided to make the Hotel Bouctou their headquarters, they announced. But first, some changes would be made.

  “You take out all the bottles of beer and other alcohol, all the photos, from both of your buildings and then we will see if we can work here,” Ghali told him. Touré smiled ruefully. He had won Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s business, he realized, but it would end up costing him dearly. He called together his staff.

  “Get rid of everything, every bottle we have, and every photo we have,” he said.

  The Hotel Bouctou staff dutifully took down images of traditional Timbuktu life—camel herders, Niger River fishermen, weavers, and musicians—from the halls and public areas, and stripped the guest rooms as well. Then they dug a trench behind the hotel and dumped in hundreds of bottles of beer, wine, and hard liquor. They smashed the bottles with hammers. Great foaming puddles of beer mixed with amber rivulets of scotch and bourbon, blood-red pools of burgundies, and clear streams of vodka, sinking into the sand amid explosions and cascades of shattering glass. Touré forlornly watched thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor dribble away, as Ghali and Abou Zeid looked on approvingly.

  Abou Zeid and Ghali held their first meeting with city elders in the Hotel Bouctou dining room the following afternoon. Abdel Kader Haidara remained at home, intent on avoiding drawing attention to himself. Fifty people, including the mayor of Timbuktu, sat in hard-backed white chairs around two white rectangular tables in a shabby space dominated by the now empty blue-painted bar. Sunlight filtered through windows covered with pink blinds. Dozens of armed Islamist militants, and three or four secular Tuareg commanders, sat on benches on the room’s perimeter. Iyad Ag Ghali addressed the crowd in French.

  “Peuple de Tombouctou, nous sommes vos nouveaus maîtres,” he began. People of Timbuktu, we are your new masters. “From this moment on, we plan to develop Islam in the city of Timbuktu.”

  The imam of Sidi Yahya Mosque, one of Timbuktu’s oldest and most venerated houses of worship—finished in 1440 after forty years under construction, famed for a pair of Moroccan-style wooden doors that, according to a local legend, were meant to remain closed until the End of Days—interrupted him. “We don’t want to listen to this,” he shouted. “Get out of our city. Give us back our peace. We don’t want your kind of Islam here.”

  Elders reacted in alarm. “Don’t talk like that. These people are barbarians,” one whispered. “They will kill you.”

  The imam waved him off. “How dare you say you’re going to ‘teach us Islam’? We were born with Islam. We have had Islam in
this city for one thousand years.”

  Ghali turned to Abou Zeid.

  “We’re going to have to replace the imams in this town,” he said.

  The meeting dissolved in acrimony.

  A week later, Iyad Ag Ghali and his men took over Radio Communal Bouctou, the only one of the city’s seven radio stations that had stayed on the air after the occupation. The station’s eclectic programming had reflected the city’s mix of ethnic groups and cultures: news in Arabic, Songhoy, Tamasheq, and Hausa; call-in talk shows in which residents in this city of about 54,000 discussed their problems, marital or political; news broadcasts from Radio France International; and many genres of music. The jihadis presented the program director with a USB stick, containing the Koran in MP3 format, and ordered him to play verses in sequence throughout the day and night.

  Fiery sermons delivered live by Ghali, threatening whippings and amputations, marked the only deviations from the program. “We used to go into forty-seven villages around the Niger River and record their traditional music,” the station’s director, a grizzled sixty-seven-year-old with sunken cheeks, told me as we sat on the porch outside the studio at City Hall many months later. “But when the jihadis took over, there was nothing but the Koran.” The Islamist militant who had been placed in charge of the station seized twenty years’ worth of cassettes—folkloric music, interviews, benedictions—stuffed the confiscated tapes into four rice bags and carted them off to be burned.

  As Ghali ranted on the airwaves about Shariah law, the jihadi leaders made a few tenuous attempts to ingratiate themselves with Timbuktu’s populace. They coordinated shipments of food aid with the Red Crescent Society, expropriated looted ambulances from the unruly Tuareg rebels and returned them to the city’s hospital, and agreed to meet twice a week with a committee established by the city’s religious figures, doctors, teachers, and neighborhood representatives. Though asked to participate in the committee, Abdel Kader Haidara kept his distance. He had other work to do.

  At the end of April, Abou Zeid, Ghali, and their secular Tuareg counterparts even invited this group of Timbuktu notables, who called themselves the “Crisis Committee,” to celebrate the declaration of Azawad’s independence. Ibrahim Khalil Touré, a sixty-seven-year-old book collector, private museum owner, and leader of the Djingareyber quarter, reluctantly accepted the jihadis’ invitation, and persuaded many of his colleagues on the committee to join him. “I went to this celebration—and they told us ‘we have occupied Azawad, and we have an obligation to find a way to live together,’ ” said Touré, a leonine figure whose copper skin contrasted sharply with his lily-white turban and emerald boubou. We were sitting on carpets in a second-floor receiving room in Touré’s home on an alley in Djingareyber, a medieval quarter dominated by the fourteenth-century mosque of the same name. The salon was decorated with Tuareg swords and dusty family photographs, and a gas-operated “cooling machine” stirred up the stultifying air, rattling as we talked.

  Abou Zeid and Ghali, joined by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, now the commander of Gao, had been convivial hosts, Touré said, welcoming the elders to a villa near the port, and leading them to a banquet table covered with bottles of Fanta, Sprite, and Coke. Jihadi butchers slaughtered a sheep and roasted it on a spit on their behalf. The jihadi commanders struck a reasonable tone. “Shariah is going to come little by little, and if you want it faster, we’ll bring it faster,” Abou Zeid assured the committee members, while Ghali grunted and said nothing.

  “Abou Zeid had a preternatural calm about him,” Touré recalled many months later. “Perhaps he had a rock-hard heart beneath, but he smiled, he seemed calm, and he was in total control. He never shouted, never raised his voice. And when you were listening to his soothing voice, you were obliged to become calm yourself.” For five hours the delegates and the jihadis prayed, feasted, and talked. They exchanged mobile phone numbers, shook hands, and said goodbye. “We will work together, there won’t be any problems,” the jihadi leaders assured them.

  The era of good feelings did not last. Black flags soon covered every municipal building in Timbuktu. Billboards for Orange cell phones, Air Mali, Coca-Cola, and other products were ripped down, and armed fighters from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and their Ansar Dine partners swaggered through the streets, intimidating anyone who crossed their path. Estimates on their numbers varied, but most citizens put the figure at between five hundred and one thousand militants in Timbuktu, making them all but unavoidable in every neighborhood of the city. Almost immediately after declaring Azawad’s independence, in late April, the jihadi commanders deployed squads of enforcers, bearded men wearing black turbans and blue vests with the words “Islamic Police” written in French and Arabic—as well as a handful of teenagers who were still too young to grow beards—who fanned out across Timbuktu in pickup trucks flying black jihadi flags. “Everything happened little by little,” Ibrahim Khalil Touré recalled. “They destroyed the beverage warehouses and the bars. They appointed a judge who was responsible for morals, and he enjoyed his work. He began personally arresting women and menacing them because they weren’t properly dressed—with veils that covered the whole face, robes that covered everything but the hands.”

  The Islamic Police screeched around corners and swooped down on unsuspecting people in a cloud of dust, snatching cigarettes out of the mouths of pedestrians and arresting women and girls who went about unveiled, or who wore perfume, bracelets, or rings. They brought many of these women at gunpoint to the Commercial Bank of Mali, a three-story, sand-colored building that had been looted immediately after the occupation. Its warrens of offices had been converted into cells and interrogation centers, and an ATM booth in front—a sweltering cubicle sealed by an iron gate—became a punishment chamber where the offending girls and women were forced to stand for hours, deprived of food and water. The black-turbaned, AK-47-toting enforcers stormed through Timbuktu’s market, flogging women for failing to cover themselves. “I saw three members of the Islamic police beat a fish seller because she wasn’t properly covered,” one trader recounted to Human Rights Watch. “They told a middle-aged woman selling mangos to cover up but she refused. They started hitting her; she tried to protect her face, all the while saying defiantly, ‘No, forget it. You people took the village and drove away all our business, it’s you who must submit to Shariah.’ They beat her five, ten, twenty times but still she refused.”

  Islamist authorities banned musical cell phone ringers, insisting that only Koranic verses were acceptable. When one boy’s ringer played a tune as he walked past Islamic Police headquarters, “he frantically tried to hit the answer button in his pocket,” a witness recalled. “They told him to come but the youth talked back; two Islamists whipped him with a switch until he bled, saying, ‘If we were the Malian army you wouldn’t be speaking to us like that!’ ” The jihadis forbade baptisms, marriages, and circumcisions, the joyful rituals of Timbuktu life. Wedding processions, noisy festivals of ululating women and banging tindé drums, vanished. Shops closed early and people stayed off the streets, fearful of running into Islamic Police patrols. One former tour operator was sitting with friends at a sidewalk café, drinking tea and listening to music from the Côte d’Ivoire on his boom box, when a pickup filled with police pulled up in front of them; the jihadis told the gathering that the music is “condemned by God,” and threatened them with pistols. “They removed the memory card from the boom box and three days later they returned it,” the tour operator said. “They’d erased the music and put on Koranic verses.”

  The police broke up a gathering of boys and men watching the European Association’s Champions League soccer match on TV, telling them that it was forbidden to watch television in public. A café owner was ordered to carry two foosball tables from outside into his establishment because “they are a bad influence for children. The boys should be praying, not playing in the street.” Four Islamist gunmen randomly stopped a twenty-nine-year-old woman in the street, searched h
er, and discovered pictures of Western pop stars, including Celine Dion, on her mobile phone. They lashed her on the spot with a camel-skin whip. “I did not count how many times they hit me,” she said. Islamist officers beat a group of boys and girls for swimming together in the river.

  A seamstress who fled the north told Human Rights Watch, “The north feels dead. As a woman I can’t dress up, wear perfume, go for a stroll with my friends. . . . They’ve even outlawed chatting in groups. They say instead of talking we should go home and read the Koran.” By May perhaps one third of the population of fifty-four thousand had fled Timbuktu for Bamako or refugee camps in Mauritania and Burkina Faso, and the city fell into silence and stagnation. One Timbuktu resident lamented, “They’ve taken all the joie de vivre from our lives.”

  The Al Qaeda imams issued fatwas, which they announced on their radio station, decreeing prison terms or public whippings for unmarried couples, consumers of alcohol, people discovered listening to music, smokers, and men without beards or with trousers that extended to their ankles—all considered haram, or forbidden, according to certain Hadith cited by the extremists.

  “The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: Isbaal (wearing one’s garment below the ankles), may apply to the izaar (lower garment), the shirt or the turban. Whoever allows any part of these to trail on the ground out of arrogance, Allah will not look at him on the Day of Judgment,” a Hadith declared.

  “We were ordered to wear our beards like the Prophet,” Ibrahim Khalil Touré remembered. “They would stop you on the street and hold your face and check. You could shave your head, your mustache, but you could not touch the beard.”

  In May, the Hôtel La Maison, a century-old limestone villa built around a tiled courtyard, where Bono and his entourage had spent a night in January 2012, was declared the city’s Shariah Court. Overnight it became the most dreaded destination in Timbuktu. When I visited the hotel a year later, after the jihadi occupation had collapsed, the Tuareg caretaker escorted me upstairs to an arched verandah overlooking a mosaic fountain in the courtyard. (The French owner had fled to Europe in March 2012, days before the rebels seized the city.) Here, in two adjoining former guest rooms with log-beamed ceilings and thick stone walls, Islamic judges had presided over hearings and pronounced judgments. “They sentenced people to be flogged,” the caretaker told me. In a plaza beside the market—nicknamed “Tahrir Square” because it became the center of tumultous changes and violence under jihadi rule—or in the Sankoré Square, in front of the mosque that once contained the finest university in Timbuktu, convicted criminals were stripped, and lashed with a camel-hair switch, a tree branch, or an electrical cord. The whippings often left open sores and welts.