While Haidara and his team prepared to launch the boatlift, the jihadi army was in retreat. Two convoys of blood-streaked pickup trucks, led by Iyad Ag Ghali and Abou Zeid and filled with corpses and the groaning and bloodied injured, made their way back toward Timbuktu, while another convoy veered off toward Gao. Choking clouds of sand and dust rose above Abou Zeid and Ghali’s caravans as they rolled for hours along the rough track beneath a sweltering sun. The militant leaders had planned to converge triumphantly with their forces in Bamako and declare Mali a jihadi state. But they had not anticipated the rapid intervention of the French army, and their miscalculation had brought about a debacle. Upon reaching Timbuktu, the militant leaders dropped the injured at the government hospital, buried the dead, and demanded that the director of Radio Azawad, formerly Radio Communal Bouctou, announce that the jihadis had defeated the Malian army.
“We killed and injured hundreds of them,” Ghali declared.
“How many did you lose?” the director asked.
“That isn’t your concern,” the jihadi leader replied.
Soon the French army made its first aerial forays over the city. Drones and French warplanes buzzed in the skies, a portent of the coming attack.
The imam of Timbuktu’s most venerated mosque, Djingareyber, approached the jihadi authorities, who had turned increasingly agitated and hostile, regarding a matter of great importance for the city’s Sufis. Mawloud, the weeklong celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, and the most joyful occasion on Timbuktu’s calendar, fell on the 21st of January, only days away. Originating as a Shi’ite festival in Persia in the twelfth century, Mawloud had arrived in Timbuktu around 1600, and it had been celebrated with gusto ever since. A period of feasting, singing, and dancing, Mawloud combined the rituals of Sufi Islam with a celebration of Timbuktu’s rich literary traditions. It culminated with an evening gathering of thousands of people in the large sandy square in front of the Sankoré Mosque and a public reading of some of the city’s most treasured manuscripts. For a city that had been starved of a reason to celebrate for nearly a year, the imam of Djingareyber saw Mawloud as a critical morale booster, a reed of hope for a despondent population.
The imam asked Abou Zeid for permission to plan the festivities. “Normally our marabouts read from our manuscripts for this festival,” the imam explained.
“I don’t have a problem with this, imam,” Abou Zeid said, surprising the religious leader with his apparent receptivity. But Abou Zeid added that he was a fighter, not an intellectual, and would have to defer to his “religious experts.”
Al Qaeda’s minister of moral enforcement in Timbuktu listened impassively as the imam, joined by members of Timbuktu’s Crisis Committee, made an emotional plea for the festival.
“That holiday does not exist,” he announced when they had finished. It constituted a “reprehensible innovation.” He cited a Hadith in which the Prophet had declared, “I urge you to follow my Sunnah and the way of the rightly guided caliphs after me; adhere to it and cling to it firmly. Beware of newly invented things, for every newly invented thing is an innovation (bid’ah) and every innovation is a going-astray.”
“But it is sanctioned by other Hadith,” the imam argued.
“Bring me proof,” the bearded, turbaned morality minister replied.
The Sufi imams of Timbuktu, marabouts, and members of the crisis group created a “Committee of Proof” to assemble all the evidence they could muster from the texts supporting the festival. Although many Sunni scholars had railed through the centuries against making the Prophet’s birthday a special occasion, the Committee of Proof found Hadith that suggested that some leeway existed. Several Hadith commanded Muslims to “venerate” the Prophet, without stipulating the manner in which that should be done. Verse 114 from the Surah Al-Ma’idah in the Koran suggested that the earliest followers of the Prophet considered feasting a proper way to commemorate an event of religious significance. “Eisa, the son of Maryam, said, ‘O Allah, O our Lord! Send down to us a table spread from heaven, so that it may become a day of celebration for us.’ ” And Mohammed himself had acknowledged the glory of the day that he came into the world: “The Holy Prophet (Peace and Blessings of Allah be Upon Him) said: ‘When my mother gave birth to me she saw a light proceeding from her which showed her the castles of Syria.’ ”
Al Qaeda’s morality minister again listened without a change of expression as the Committee of Proof recited the relevant verses. “Fine,” he said when they were done. “But you still can’t do it. There will be men and women meeting in the streets, and that is inappropriate. You can’t do it. That’s it. There won’t be a Mawloud festival.”
Then the morals enforcer delivered a chilling message. “You need to bring us those manuscripts,” he said, “and we are going to burn them.”
In the gathering darkness, with Timbuktu’s jihadi leaders demanding the manuscripts and the members of the Crisis Committee promising to deliver them, but stalling for time, a lone vessel left from Toya on a test run. The thirty-foot boat motored down the center of the river, passing flat mud banks, thatched huts, and low dunes silhouetted against the twilight sky. “The moments of sunset upon the river are those of the greatest intensity of life,” Dubois wrote in Timbuctoo the Mysterious. “The canoes multiply near the villages bringing the fruit of the field to buildings to which the people will flock for tomorrow’s market . . . and the great trees on the banks are so whitened at this hour by the sleeping ospreys that they seem to have been covered by a fall of snow.” Swells thrashed against the vessel as it cut through the water toward Djenné. Then, with alarm, the couriers and captains heard an engine and the whir of rotor blades. A French attack helicopter swooped down low over the water and hovered above the craft. The pilots shone spotlights on the boat, blinding those onboard. “Open the footlockers,” they demanded over a loudspeaker. The French warned the crew that they would sink the boat on suspicion of smuggling weapons if the couriers refused. The terrified teenaged couriers fumbled with the locks beneath the glare, flung the chests open, and then stepped aside. The pilots could see that the chests were filled with only paper. The helicopters flew off.
Shortly afterward, twenty pinasses, each carrying fifteen metal chests filled with manuscripts, motored in a convoy down the Niger from a port near Timbuktu. Haidara and Brady had decided that the boats should travel in flotillas, both to speed up the evacuation and provide, they hoped, a certain safety in numbers. Passing beyond the monochromatic emptiness of Tuareg territory, they reached a transition zone where the arid Saharan wastes give way to more fertile climes—palm trees, thickets of low bushes. Ahead lay Lake Debo, the inland sea formed by the seasonal flooding of central Mali’s inland Niger Delta, “a huge basin of water . . . a veritable sea. . . . Its shores are invisible, for no distant mountains betray their boundaries,” Dubois wrote.
But as they approached the lake, the Niger seemed to disappear before their eyes, swallowed up by a sea of grass. “It is in truth a singular element, being neither land nor water, but a strange mixture of both,” Dubois observed. “From a depth of six to eight feet the tall grasses emerge, thick and green, and wearing all the appearance of a great field. . . . We are no longer upon the water, but seem . . . to be sliding over grassy steppes streaked with watery paths.” The aquatic meadow formed an ideal sanctuary during this period of chaos for bandits. As the convoy threaded its way along channels through the grass, a dozen turbaned men brandishing Kalashnikovs emerged from the dense vegetation. They ordered the flotilla to stop. Forcing open the locks, the men thumbed through the Arabic texts and brightly colored geometric patterns covering the brittle pages.
“We will keep these,” they announced.
The couriers pleaded with them and offered their cheap Casio watches, silver bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When that failed, they got on the phone with Haidara, in Bamako. He urged the bandits to release the couriers and the cargo, promising to deliver a sizeable ransom as
soon as possible.
“Trust me on this, we will get you your money,” Haidara said.
Haidara couldn’t afford not to pay them, he would later explain: thousands of other manuscripts were already heading downriver. The couriers waited nervously beside their metal trunks while the bandits debated what to do. At last, the gunmen, understanding Haidara’s predicament, released the boats and the manuscripts. One of Haidara’s agents, as promised, delivered the cash four days later.
At Brady’s home in Bamako, Haidara spent fifteen hours a day talking simultaneously on eight cell phones to his team of couriers, whom he had instructed to brief him every fifteen minutes when they were on the road. Huge sheets of brown butcher paper taped to one wall tracked the names of the teenagers, their latest cell phone contacts, the number of footlockers each was carrying, their locations, and conditions en route. Brady sent text messages to her donors informing them of progress: 75 FOOTLOCKERS GOING THROUGH, OUR KIDS HAVE MADE IT ACROSS LAKE DEBO, ARE NOW IN MOPTI. During one frenetic day toward the end of the boatlift, 150 taxicabs, each carrying three footlockers and a courier, made the journey from Djenné to Bamako.
In Timbuktu, French Mirage jets bombed Al Qaeda’s barracks and then targeted Abou Zeid’s residence—delivering a rocket that blew out the back half of Qaddafi’s former villa and wrecked the salon where the King of African Kings, then the Al Qaeda emir, had held meetings and receptions. Abou Zeid, anticipating the French attack, had vacated the premises well ahead of time.
A few months after the attack I followed a faint sand track past thorn trees and a few walled-off compounds to a rise in the desert. Behind an iron gate stood a Moorish-style villa of beige concrete, with oblong windows and turquoise ornamental trim, surrounded by a garden of pine and palm trees. “We still call this place ‘Chirac’s Dune,’ ” my Tuareg guide, Azima Ag Ali Mohammed, told me. In 2006, he explained, Qaddafi had chosen to build this desert retreat on the exact site where the French president had met hundreds of dignitaries in a Tuareg tent during a 2003 tour of Francophone West Africa. “Qaddafi was jealous of Western leaders,” Azima went on, and wanted to prove that he was their equal.
We squeezed through a gap in the gate and walked through the unlocked front door. “This is where Abou Zeid held his meetings,” he said, leading me into a low-ceilinged room divided by square columns. Shards of glass, marble tile fragments, and chunks of concrete littered the floor. Broken roof slabs blocked the view of the garden. As I walked around the outside of the house—skirting the charred remains of a Nissan sedan, bullet casings, and rubber hoses from Qaddafi’s irrigation system—I heard a rustling. I looked up, startled, to see a white-robed herdsman leading six donkeys up and over the huge pile of rubble. “Salaam Aleikum,” he said, with a deferential nod of his head, then continued on his way.
After the French scored a direct hit on Abou Zeid’s residence, the Al Qaeda emir summoned the Crisis Committee for a final meeting. The hospitals were overflowing with the dead and injured, Ibrahim Khalil Touré remembered, and the jihadi leader was in a somber mood. Letting his calm demeanor slip for the first time, Abou Zeid slammed his hand down on the table in the dark conference room. “There can be no mockery of us,” he warned. “If we see anyone celebrating in front of his house, he will be immediately killed. If we see anybody laughing or ridiculing us, he will be killed.” Abou Zeid warned Touré and the other committee members that the penalty for looting Arab shops in revenge would also be death. “The population should stay calm, and should not aid the enemy, and not mock us as long as we are here,” he reemphasized. Abou Zeid dismissed the group at nine o’clock that night. The end, Touré was sure, was imminent.
The next morning, Iyad Ag Ghali packed his Land Cruiser and slipped out of town. His dreams of a caliphate unified under Shariah law had collapsed, and the protean figure that had morphed from rebel leader to presidential security adviser to jihadi had taken on a new identity: fugitive. Abou Zeid lingered in town for another four days. On Friday, January 25, after prayers, he and his lieutenants slaughtered a lamb and prepared a méchoui—the entire animal skinned and roasted on a spit—and ate it in the dunes. Abou Zeid placed his five European hostages in a pair of SUVs and drove out of the city in a nine-vehicle convoy. His militiamen destroyed the city’s mobile phone tower and stripped the radio station of its consoles and computers. Then they turned their attention to the objects that they had mostly ignored until now: the manuscripts.
18
On Friday morning, January 25, 2013, fifteen jihadis entered the restoration and conservation rooms on the ground floor of the Ahmed Baba Institute in Sankoré, the government library that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had taken over the previous April. For nearly a year, thousands of manuscripts left behind by the Ahmed Baba staff had been sitting in the open, stacked on shelves and lying on restoration tables, while the jihadis prayed, trained, ate, and slept around them.
Now, on the verge of being expelled from Timbuktu, the Al Qaeda fighters would exact their retribution. The men swept 4,202 manuscripts off lab tables and shelves, and carried them into the tiled courtyard. In an act of nihilistic vindictiveness that they had been threatening for months, the jihadis made a pyre of the ancient texts, including fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, their fragile pages covered with algebraic formulas, charts of the heavens, and molecular diagrams. They doused the manuscripts in gasoline, watching in satisfaction as the liquid saturated them, and tossed in a lit match. The brittle pages and their dry leather covers ignited in a flash. The flames rose higher, licking at a concrete column around which the volumes had been arranged. In minutes, the work of some of Timbuktu’s greatest savants and scientists, preserved for centuries, hidden from the nineteenth-century jihadis and the French conquerors, survivors of floods and the pernicious effects of dust, bacteria, water, and insects, were consumed by the inferno.
Seven months later, I walked through the Sankoré neighborhood and entered the institute, a three-story labyrinth of long hallways, Moorish-style arches, and beige stucco walls made to resemble traditional mud brick. Just inside the entrance, a white-bearded septuagenarian, wearing a white turban and matching white gown, sat on the floor, one leg extended, the other propping up a cardboard box used for manuscript storage. The box was filled with charred scraps of paper. He sifted through the blackened bits, arranging them as if assembling a jigsaw puzzle. He stared intently at the remains, mumbling to himself, lost in his futile task.
“A caretaker saw smoke rising,” curator Bouya Haidara, a gnomish figure who bears no relation to Abdel Kader Haidara, told me, as he stood beside the blackened concrete pillar, the only remaining evidence, beside the charred scraps in the manuscript box, of the crime that had taken place here. The caretaker had retrieved a few scorched pages from the fire, but the rest had been destroyed. Then, leaving nothing but blackened page fragments and ashes, the jihadis followed Abou Zeid and Ghali into the desert.
And yet out of this wanton act of destruction the curators of the Ahmed Baba Institute had managed to extract a small victory. Bouya escorted me down a wide flight of stairs to the basement, leading the way by flashlight, since power had still not been restored to the city months after the occupation. He turned the key in the lock, and cast his beam over black, moisture-resistant cardboard boxes neatly arranged on dozens of metal shelves, as tidy and ordered as the stacks of a university library in the United States. During their ten months of living at the Ahmed Baba Institute, the fighters had never bothered to venture downstairs to this dark and climate-controlled storage room hidden behind a locked door. Inside were stacks containing 10,603 restored manuscripts, folios, and leather-encased volumes, among the finest works in the collection. “All of them—untouched,” Bouya Haidara said.
In Bamako, Abdel Kader Haidara saw the burning of the manuscripts as a confirmation of the jihadis’ intentions—and a vindication of his remarkable undertaking. Starting with no money besides the meag
er sum in his savings account, Haidara had recruited a loyal circle of volunteers, badgered and shamed the international community into funding the scheme by presenting it as an epic showdown between civilization and the forces of barbarism, raised $1 million—a tremendous sum for Timbuktu—and hired hundreds of amateur smugglers in Timbuktu and beyond.
In a low-tech operation that seemed quaintly anomalous in the second decade of the twenty-first century, he and his team had transported to safety, by river and by road, past hostile jihadi guards and suspicious Malian soldiers, past bandits, attack helicopters, and other potentially lethal obstacles, almost all of Timbuktu’s 377,000 manuscripts. Not one had been lost en route. “Abdel Kader and I experienced something I have trouble describing. Power, strength, perseverance can’t adequately articulate what it was,” Emily Brady said in her online interview via Reddit. “We kept thinking that we had to lose some manuscripts—theft, bandits, belligerents . . . combat, books in canoes on the Niger River—we had to lose some, right? Well, we didn’t. Not a single manuscript was compromised during the evacuation—nada, zero. They all made it.”
Timbuktu had been the incubator for the richness of Islam, and Islam in its perverted form had attempted to destroy it. But the original power of the culture itself, and the people, like Haidara, who had become entranced by that power, had saved the great manuscripts in the end. Haidara would often be asked in the coming months if the effort had been worth the trouble. What would have happened, interlocutors demanded, if he had sat back and done nothing? “The only response can be ‘I cannot be one-hundred-percent certain,’ ” he would respond. “But I think that if we had left them alone, if we had not acted, many more would have ended up like the manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute.”
Haidara often chose such moments to portray Timbuktu as a paragon of moderation and intellectual ferment that had fallen victim to a once-in-a-millennium conflagration. The reality, of course, is more complex and less flattering to the city’s reputation. Timbuktu had witnessed the killings of scholars by the Emperor Sunni Ali in the 1300s, the rise of the anti-Semitic preacher Muhammed Al Maghili in the 1490s, the edicts of King Askia Mohammed banning and imprisoning Jews during that same decade, and the implementation of Shariah law in Timbuktu by the jihadis in the early and mid-1800s. The city seemed to be in a constant state of flux, periods of openness and liberalism followed by waves of intolerance and repression. “These Wahhabis who came to Timbuktu in 2012 represented something entirely new,” Haidara always insisted, though it was clear that similar strains of anti-intellectualism, religious purification, and barbarism had coursed through the city repeatedly over the preceding five centuries.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 20