The jihadis’ Shariah punishments became more draconian. In August the Islamic Police in Timbuktu summoned Muhamen Bebao, twenty-three, a slim man with a wispy beard, to the court at the Hôtel La Maison and sentenced him to a month in jail and a $750 fine for purchasing a stolen mattress for $22. Bebao admitted purchasing the mattress from a friend—but claimed that he didn’t know that the friend had seized it from a shop during the looting spree in Timbuktu in April. On the day before Bebao’s scheduled liberation, he was given a new sentence: the amputation of his right hand. “When I heard the sentence I got weak,” Bebao told me, as we sat in the office of a Bamako agency that provided some charity to maimed victims of Islamist justice. The police bound him to a chair with bicycle inner tubes. They dispatched a volunteer to the market to purchase a kitchen knife. Bebao received an injection of an anesthetic. He has only a foggy memory of being carried in the chair to the sandy depression behind the Libya Hotel, all that remained of a five-mile canal that Qaddafi had dredged, at a cost of millions of dollars, from the Niger River to his resort—and no memory of his hand being sawed off. “People think it’s done with a single stroke, but it’s with a knife, slowly cut, as if you’re an animal,” one witness to the amputation told me. Bebao woke up in pain in a Timbuktu clinic, he told me, as he displayed for me his empty sleeve. A local physician nursed him back to health, and he fled Timbuktu.
In late July, in a village outside Gao, Islamic Police arrested a man named Almahmoud and accused him of stealing livestock, saying that they had followed motorcycle tracks from the theft site to his house. After two weeks in a jail cell, “At around three p.m. they took me to the public square, which was full of people,” he told a Human Rights Watch investigator. “They tied my hands, feet, and chest firmly to a chair; my right hand was tied with a rubber cord. The boss, himself, cut my hand as if he were killing a sheep. As he cut it, which took about two minutes, he shouted ‘Allahu Akbar.’ . . . I stayed in the cell for a week without seeing a doctor. . . . Later [the militants] gave me money to repair my motorcycle, and to buy tea and clothes and brought me back home. I am innocent: I didn’t steal those animals.”
Weeks later, in a village near Timbuktu, a local Tuareg shot dead a Sorhai fisherman during an altercation. He was swiftly sentenced to death. That Friday morning, pickup trucks equipped with loudspeakers circulated through the alleys of Timbuktu, ordering the population to Qaddafi’s grand canal to witness the execution following the afternoon prayer. The jihadis ordered the director of Radio Communal Bouctou, renamed Radio Azawad, to announce the impending event. Five hundred spectators gathered along the barren depression that once was Qaddafi’s grand canal, behind the Libya Hotel, now designated as the amputation and execution ground. The condemned man, riding in the back of a pickup, alit on the sand, dropped to his knees, and prayed. Abou Zeid and the Al Qaeda henchmen stood to one side, near the victim’s mother, while a two-man masked firing squad fixed Kalashnikovs on the kneeling prisoner. Abou Zeid and his men cried, “Allahu Akbar.” Then the executioners fired from fifteen feet away.
In the town of Aguelhok, near Kidal, Ansar Dine militants loyal to Iyad Ag Ghali dragged to the village square a young couple from a nearby rural area that had had a child out of wedlock. At five o’clock in the morning, before two hundred people who watched in silence, the Islamists dug two holes four feet deep, buried the couple up to their necks, and stoned them to death. “It was horrible,” an eyewitness recounted, noting that the woman had moaned and cried out and that her partner had shouted something indistinct just before he died. “It was inhuman. They killed them like they were animals.” An Ansar Dine spokesman defended the punishment. “They both died right away and even asked for this application,” he said. “We don’t have to answer to anyone over the application of Shariah.”
Around the same time, a panel of five judges convicted four young men in Shariah court in Gao of robbing a bus at gunpoint—a crime that called for the amputation of the right hand and left foot. Hours later the men received their punishment. Four had their limbs hacked off in a military camp, the fifth was taken in a Land Cruiser to the Place de l’Indépendance, the main market square in Gao. Bodyguards of the police commissioner, a man named Aliou, bound the convicted robber to a chair with a rope and gave him an injection. “Aliou took two butcher knives, laid them on a piece of black rubber and said, ‘Allahu Akbar’ which the other Islamists repeated,” a witness to the mutilation said. “Then he put one knife down, and with the other, cut off the young man’s hand—it took but ten seconds to chop it off. He held it up for all to see. Another Islamist with a beard took the second knife, said ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and cut off the foot. The [jihadis] started to pray and said that they were doing what God asked them to do. Aliou ordered the man to be untied, and at the same time asked for a bag in his car. It was the bag with the four feet and hands amputated from the other thieves. He then placed the new foot and hand inside and they said, ‘Allahu Akbar.’ ”
The jihadis’ brutality drew the disapproval of even Abdelmalek Droukdel, the Algerian-based supreme emir of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. For months Droukdel had looked askance at his underlings’ provocative actions in Mali—the declaration of an independent state, the beatings and whippings of ordinary citizens in Timbuktu and Gao. While he sanctioned the bombings of government targets, terrorist attacks on embassies, and abductions for ransom of Westerners, Droukdel was coming to regard Ghali, Abou Zeid, and Belmokhtar as impetuous fanatics who were likely to alienate the very people they were trying to win over. Now, the accelerating wave of amputations, stonings, and executions confirmed his sense that they had gone too far.
But the three jihadi commanders, who had gotten used to acting with near-complete autonomy, ignored Droukdel’s admonitions—and they even bragged about their brutality. In the new jihadi state, the Islamists created a parallel universe that combined medieval theology with twenty-first-century communication. They flaunted their absolute power and their Shariah punishments in YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and website communiqués.
Some people defied the jihadis. In Gao, Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s henchmen announced that a public amputation would take place at the Place de l’Indépendance at eight o’clock one morning. Thousands filled the streets leading into the plaza and blocked the way. “You will not do this in Gao,” they proclaimed. The jihadis called off the amputation, then carried it out stealthily in the plaza before dawn a week later.
One hot summer night, Mohammed Touré, Haidara’s nephew and chief assistant, left the headquarters of Haidara’s library owners association, Savama-DCI, with a metal chest full of manuscripts. He had been working alone that evening, and as he locked the front gate behind him and stepped into the alley, one of Al Qaeda’s most fanatical and unpredictable leaders, Oumar Ould Hamaha, fifty, known as “Red Beard,” walked past the building with bodyguards. “He lived in the house right next to Savama-DCI, and I didn’t even know that,” Touré said. A pinched-looking man with large lips, a distinctive henna-dyed goatee, and an ever-present black turban, Hamaha had risen through the ranks of Al Qaeda to serve as the top lieutenant of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, and recently the two jihadis had become in-laws: Belmokhtar had taken one of Red Beard’s teenaged daughters as his latest wife. Red Beard had become a notorious figure in Timbuktu—and much of the world—because of his televised threats against the West, delivered in flawless French, which this camel driver’s son from Kidal had learned as a boy in a Timbuktu lycée, or high school. He shone a flashlight in Touré’s face.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I’m sorry,” Touré stammered, momentarily blinded by the beam of light, “but soon we’re going to be moving, and I’m transferring these manuscripts to a place where they’ll be better secured.”
“No,” said Red Beard. “You’re stealing them.”
“Certainly not.”
“You’re moving them in the middle of the night, and who gave you the authorization
to do so?”
“I . . . I didn’t think I needed permission to move my own stuff.”
Red Beard summoned the Islamic Police. Three pickup trucks filled with black-turbaned enforcers pulled up to the building. They too demanded to see Touré’s authorization. When he failed to produce it, they arrested him.
“You are a thief,” he was told.
Touré knew that the Islamists put little time between issuing Shariah judgments and meting out punishments. Grounded in Islamic scholarship, he cited Hadith and Koranic verses stating that proof of a misdeed was required before punishment was meted out.
“The proof is there. You were robbing this library,” Red Beard said.
“It belongs to me,” Touré insisted, “and I was moving the books to a more secure location.”
“Prove it to me,” Red Beard demanded.
“Fine,” said Touré, improvising. “I will call the imams, and the chiefs of the quarter, and at nine o’clock tomorrow morning they will come and they will give testimony about who owns the library.”
He bought himself time, but his fate was unclear. In Bamako, while Touré was being kept in custody, Haidara frantically made phone calls, contacting imams, neighborhood leaders, and librarians. The men worked through the night, assembling documents and affidavits attesting to Touré’s affiliation with the Mamma Haidara Library and the librarians association, and his role as a custodian of the manuscripts. The witnesses gathered at the governor’s office at nine a.m., with the Islamic Police, judges, Red Beard, Abou Zeid, and other jihadi leaders. The judges interrogated the witnesses. Touré, unlike many of those judged by the north’s Shariah courts, had been privileged enough to marshal the support of the city’s most influential religious, business, and cultural figures. Twenty-four hours after his arrest, the judges told Touré that the evidence had been overwhelming in his favor and that he was free to go. That night he resumed packing. “There was only one objective: to save the knowledge of Mali, and I didn’t consider my life worth anything compared to that,” Touré said.
Not every librarian had gotten onboard at first. The curators of Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute, the Kuwaiti- and Saudi-financed government library where Haidara had been employed collecting manuscripts in the hinterlands for fifteen years, hesitated. Soon after the rebels seized Timbuktu, twenty Al Qaeda fighters had occupied the institute’s new $8 million headquarters, which contained about fourteen thousand manuscripts, and turned it into a weapons depot and dormitory. There they prayed, studied the Koran, ate, and slept in close proximity to the greatest treasures of Timbuktu’s Golden Age, and trained with their Kalashnikovs and other weapons in the courtyards. But 24,000 manuscripts remained inside the original building—unknown to the occupiers and under the control of the Ahmed Baba staff. “These manuscripts are at risk,” Haidara had told a gathering of Ahmed Baba employees in April. “They are our patrimony. There’s no administration here, so it’s our responsibility to get them out.”
“We don’t have the means to do this,” he was told.
“I’ve got the means,” Haidara assured the curators and staff. “You need to leave everything to me. It’s my responsibility.”
Some employees believed the occupation wasn’t going to last, or trusted the jihadis’ pledges to leave the manuscripts alone. Others were reluctant to cede control to an outsider, even one who had devoted half his life to building up the collection. “After the crisis, if the manuscripts are all missing, the director could say that we stole them,” one curator told him. Dismayed by their passivity, Haidara had walked away. But he was tormented by thoughts of the manuscripts he had tracked down for fifteen years falling into the hands of Abou Zeid and his men, and, weeks later, he begged the director, who had fled to Bamako hours after the jihadis arrived in town, to act. “You designate two agents, they will meet with my agents, and we will get the manuscripts into our custody.” Arrangements were made, and in Timbuktu, Mohammed Touré delivered chests to Ahmed Baba Institute volunteers. Supervised by Touré and other members of Haidara’s team, the institute’s agents worked through the night, for two consecutive weeks, safely evacuating all 24,000 manuscripts to designated safe houses. These books were among the last to be removed from the libraries of Timbuktu and placed in private family homes, according to Haidara’s plan. By the end of that month, Touré and his team had transported ninety-five percent of the 377,000 manuscripts from Timbuktu’s libraries to more than thirty safe houses around the city. The only significant collection that was still exposed was the thousands of manuscripts at the new Ahmed Baba Institute in Sankoré, occupied and declared a barracks by the jihadis.
Shortly after Touré’s narrow escape from Shariah justice, Timbuktu’s Crisis Committee requested a meeting with Abou Zeid to discuss the Islamic Police–led crackdown in the city. At the office he had commandeered in the governor’s headquarters, he served the men soft drinks, greeted them by name, and inquired after their health and that of their families.
“Why are you whipping women, and putting them in prison in that bank?” Ibrahim Khalil Touré demanded. “These people are Muslims, they are not animists. They are not unbelievers. They believe in God. How could you put these women in a cell like this, and not let them out to pray?”
Abou Zeid professed surprise. “Is that true?” he asked. “We’ll have to have a consultation about this.”
The encounter, committee member Ibrahim Khalil Touré said later, typified Abou Zeid. The Al Qaeda commander disliked confrontations and distanced himself from the crimes being committed under his authority. Abou Zeid conducted himself like “a gentleman,” Touré said. “He always respected us.” But they never forgot that Abou Zeid had final word in the city, and they considered him as brutal as the men who worked for him. “Abou Zeid was a cold man, but calm,” said Touré. “He killed with a smile on his face.”
In Timbuktu, after harassments and beatings by the Islamic Police for refusing to wear burqas—the veils that fully cover the face—the city’s market women staged a protest. Dozens marched through the Sankoré neighborhood, waving the hated veils and shouting, “Down with Shariah law.” Islamic police fired over their heads, and placed them in custody. They brought six ringleaders to the governor’s headquarters, where Abou Zeid was waiting for them.
The Al Qaeda leader was seated on a sofa, flanked by the police commissar and the minister of moral enforcement. Abou Zeid stroked his ragged beard and refused to make eye contact with the women.
“What are the reasons that you women go to the market to do this work, and that the men stay at home, doing nothing?” he inquired in a soft voice.
“The men don’t have any work,” the leader, a fishmonger, shot back, “and if they steal to survive, you cut off their hands.”
In the face of the most powerful jihadi in Timbuktu, a man responsible for the murders of two Western hostages, and the mutilations and whippings of many of her fellow citizens, she felt no fear, she remembered. She had little left to lose. She refused to put on her veil and kept her eyes fixed on Abou Zeid, as if daring him to look at her.
Abou Zeid stared at the floor.
“Our husbands don’t have jobs,” she went on, “and you want us to spend money on these veils? We don’t have the money to buy such clothes. And when we buy them, you jihadis say they are not good enough, and send us back to buy more.”
Abou Zeid spoke so quietly that she had to lean forward to hear him. “In our religion, women do not march,” he said. “Women do not hold demonstrations.”
His expression hardened. “We are the authorities here,” he said, “and if you attempt to march or demonstrate again, anything that happens will be your own fault.” Then the women were escorted from the room. From that point until the end of the occupation, the market women refrained from further protests, but they refused to wear the despised niqabs. For their act of passive resistance, they were made to feel the extremists’ wrath. “Mostly the jihadis were targeting young women and men who
were seen together in the streets,” the fishmonger recalled, “but every Friday, they would come by the market after mosque to beat us.”
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Emily Brady, the manuscript conservator from Washington state, had been urging Haidara to evacuate the manuscripts to government territory from the first days of the jihadi takeover. Haidara had always given her the same answer: “It’s still not time.” He couldn’t bear the thought of again scattering the treasures that he had consolidated in Timbuktu. They were meant to be in the desert, he insisted, the place where they had been created, traded, and stored for centuries. But Haidara was coming to realize that at some point he would have to remove them.
“You must get them out,” Western embassy officials and several of his benefactors in Europe and the Middle East advised him. “These are terrible people. They will destroy everything before they leave.”
In the summer of 2012, a confluence of events prodded Haidara toward the drastic step that he had been delaying for months. The jihadis of Timbuktu went on their rampage in July, destroying a dozen Sufi shrines. In August, Libyan Wahhabis, known as Najdis, outdid their Timbuktu counterparts. They desecrated dozens of graves in a Sufi cemetery in Tripoli’s Old City, knocked down a mausoleum in Misrata and three in Tripoli, bulldozed and blew up the shrine of a fifteenth-century Sufi scholar in the Mediterranean coastal town of Zlitan, and fired mortar rounds at the mosque and library of Al Asmari University in the same city. The shells ignited a fire inside the library that burned thousands of manuscripts to ashes. “This is clear: what people are now doing in terms of digging up old graves and demolishing mosques is contrary to the Sunnah and the sayings of scholars,” Abdelrahman Al Gharyani, the grand mufti of Libya, the spiritual leader of the country’s Sunni Muslim community, declared, in a futile attempt to curb the Salafis’ rampage. The wave of destruction served as a frightening premonition of what could lie in store for Timbuktu.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 17