Moments after Oudot de Dainville and his men entered the Ametettaï, the jihadis opened fire on the troops with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. The parachutists crawled to cover behind boulders. Bullets ricocheted off the rocks and struck flak jackets and helmets. Kevlar vests saved four French soldiers; a bullet lodged between one man’s helmet and his skull. The Legionnaires inched forward, taking advantage of the enemy’s limited visibility, creeping up on the sides of their caves and tossing in grenades. The explosions resonated across the valley. They moved across the stony terrain, taking sniper fire from the hills, sweeping the area for fighters and weapons, tossing in more grenades and moving on.
That night they camped on rocks inside the valley, cushioning themselves as best they could with pieces of cardboard ripped off boxes of mineral water after the bottles had been consumed. Oudot de Dainville bunked down in the middle of his company. Teams of sentries kept watch. The French officer was well familiar with the fate of the French colonial commander Colonel Etienne Bonnier and his column of French and Senegalese troops, who had camped in the Sahara on the night of January 14, 1894, while on a reconnaissance mission after an exhausting thirty-five-mile march from Timbuktu. Tuareg swordsmen and cavalrymen waited in silence until the French sentries dozed off, then, at four a.m., with cries of “Kill them,” charged Bonnier and his men, leaving thirteen French officers dead, as well as a military doctor, a veterinarian, and sixty-six Senegalese infantrymen. Only one French officer had survived. “It was a disaster without precedent in the history of our colonial wars in Africa,” one French officer later wrote. This time French intelligence intercepted radio transmissions from Abou Zeid exhorting his men to wage jihad against “the dogs,” as he called the French—an echo of the call to holy war that the Tuareg warrior chief Ngouna had made against Bonnier on the eve of the massacre. Abou Zeid was rousing his men to jihad from a cave or a crawl space a couple of hundred yards from the French position.
Inching across the stony terrain at sunrise, the Legionnaires made use of technology that their colonial counterparts didn’t have: long-range guns and airpower. Oudot de Dainville’s forward air controller on the ground singled out concentrations of enemy fighters and radioed for support. CAESAR howitzers pummeled the jihadis with 155-millimeter shells that could be fired with accuracy from twenty-five miles away. Mirage jets dropped four-hundred-pound bombs capable of destroying nests of fighters hidden deep underground. Tiger helicopters swooped in low across the battlefield and struck the jihadis with rockets. Abou Zeid could do little else but hunker down and wait out the onslaught.
Barrera and his logistics team worked around the clock to keep the French well supplied and their morale high. Helicopters ferried in ten tons of bottled water daily for the two battalions—an average of two and a half gallons per soldier—enough to ward off thirst and even give them a shower from a bottle once a day. Small perks—a warm Castel beer, cigarettes trucked in from Algeria, a raw onion that they mixed in with their MREs to compensate for the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables—lifted their spirits. Barrera helicoptered back and forth from his command post in Tessalit and spent hours on the battlefield, sometimes sleeping beside his men.
On the 27th of February, after five days of combat, nearing Barrera’s projected limit of French endurance, French artillery and air-burst cluster bombs killed forty Islamist fighters at the eastern entrance to the valley. The air strikes came during a fierce firefight between a cell led by Abou Zeid and the Chadian battalion that had suffered heavy losses five days earlier.
“The French have hit us very badly,” reported one commander in an intercepted radio transmission. “I think the game is up for us.”
That day, the voice of Abou Zeid fell silent.
The massive casualties changed the tenor of the battle. “In the next few days,” Barrera told me, “The morale of the jihadis fell. We could see that they were no longer fighting.”
Two days after the cluster bombardment, Foreign Legion parachutists captured Ametettaï village, the jihadis’ only source of water, without a shot being fired. One company of Legionnaires occupied the stone huts and established a perimeter around the wells. Oudot de Dainville’s company seized the heights above the village. Holed up in their grottos and crawl spaces, the jihadis were now dependent entirely on the water that they had stashed inside. Victory, Oudot de Dainville knew, was just a matter of time.
The battle of the Ametettaï was a lopsided struggle between a modern army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and advanced communications systems, and a ragged band of fanatics who possessed only two advantages, strong defensive positions and a willingness to die for a cause. When their water ran low, they recklessly emerged from their caves in search of fresh supplies. Until now the only enemy combatants the French had encountered face-to-face had been preadolescent runners, employed to carry guns and ammunition between caves. But now desperate groups of fifteen or twenty jihadis charged from their grottos, shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The fighters sometimes advanced to within sixty feet of Oudot de Dainville and his men, then gunfire cut them down.
On March 4, the French Foreign Legionnaires and the Chadian battalion met in the center of the valley and shook hands, their pacification of the Amettetaï complete. The last jihadis had slipped out of the valley in the middle of the night, leaving behind the corpses of six hundred comrades, many blown to bits. The French had suffered only three deaths. Other French forces had simultaneously rooted the extremists out of Gao and out of the Telemsi Valley along the Niger River, a stronghold of Wahhabism where the jihadis had sought refuge.
It had taken only fifty-three days for the French military to largely vanquish a rebel force that had shaken the world and come close to seizing control of a country. The extremists, Barrera said months later, had fought “with courage and tenacity,” but, lacking popular support in the areas that they had controlled, relatively thin in numbers, and forced to make a final stand in a remote and uninhabited corner of the country, the Al Qaeda guerrillas could not withstand a massive assault by a modern European army. The French had not killed every jihadi in Mali, but they had crippled their ability to mount coordinated attacks with large numbers of fighters. The survivors had dispersed into the desert, no longer capable of controlling Timbuktu or any other community in the north.
Operation Serval was hailed almost universally as a model for future interventions—an example of a European nation going into a former colony and efficiently ridding it of a jihadi power, while suffering minimal losses. At the same time, the ease of the French victory underscored the weakness of the Malian armed forces, raising questions about the sustainability of the enterprise. Hollande made it clear that the army had no intention of lingering in Mali, but the fragility of the north suggested the French would find no easy exit. Small jihadi cells were still scattered throughout the desert, the potential for sporadic violence in northern Mali remained high, and for Abdel Kader Haidara and the manuscripts that he had rescued, it was quite likely that there would be no speedy return to Timbuktu.
Oudot de Dainville returned to Tessalit, drank a cold beer, washed his clothes, and took his first shower in two weeks. Then he and his men headed to the Terz Valley, just south of the Amettetaï, to search for jihadis who got away. They found it deserted.
Days later, French troops secretly flew the battered corpse of a jihadi commander recovered from the eastern entrance to the Ametettaï to Algiers and handed it over to Algerian intelligence officials for DNA analysis. Forensic investigators compared the body’s genetic markers with those of two relatives of Abou Zeid, and in late March the French Foreign Ministry announced a definitive determination: the emir of Timbuktu was dead. His killing, declared Hollande, “marks an important step in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel.” He had been the most ruthless and resilient of Mali’s Al Qaeda commanders, and had remained a fanatic to the end. Unlike Ghali and Belmokhtar, who had opted for escape, Abou Zeid had chosen to make a la
st stand, knowing that his only options were victory or death.
Only one question remained about Abou Zeid: How had he died? A Mauritanian private news agency reported that the AQIM chieftain had been killed in the French artillery and cluster-bomb attack at the eastern end of the valley on February 27. A few weeks after the positive identification in the Algiers lab, however, Paris Match published a photo of a bloodied corpse that appeared to be his, taken on March 2 inside a crawl space beneath a granite boulder. The blood was fresh, suggesting that Abou Zeid had survived the deadly French barrage and fought until the final hours of the jihadis’ resistance. The Chadian soldier who took the photo recounted that, after eight hours of close combat on March 2, the jihadis’ shooting had ended abruptly with a loud explosion at seven in the evening. Abou Zeid had apparently killed himself with a grenade when he realized that there was no way out. His torso was mangled but parts of his body remained intact. Inside a pocket of the diminutive corpse, Chadian soldiers found a French passport belonging to Michel Germaneau, the seventy-eight-year-old aid worker Abou Zeid had executed three years before, following a French commando raid on an Al Qaeda desert camp. The jihadi leader had apparently kept the document as a souvenir of his murder.
Epilogue
The rain fell in sheets on the sprawling city of Bamako, turning rutted roads into obstacle courses of churned-up mud and pools of fetid brown water. It was August 2013, the height of the summer rainy season, and five months after the French defeat of the jihadis in northern Mali. Abdel Kader Haidara, who was still living in Bamako, had arranged to meet me in front of Amandine, a popular café and patisserie in a riverside neighborhood with the mellifluous name of Badalabougou, to show me what had become of the manuscripts that his teams had smuggled out of Timbuktu. His driver pulled up in a Toyota Land Cruiser and Haidara, resplendently dressed in a pale blue embroidered boubou and a maroon skullcap, beckoned to me from the curb. I leapt over pools of mud in the parking lot and climbed into the rear seat. We drove through clouds of exhaust, past battered yellow taxis, rusting buses, minivans, and packs of cheap Chinese Cub model motorbikes, known locally as “Jakartas.” Street hawkers darted in and out of traffic, selling cell phone recharge cards, inflatable plastic cheetahs, crates of oranges, flashlights, gym shorts, cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs, fried millet donuts, papayas, and grilled kebabs—the desperate hustle of an impoverished city.
We turned down a wide dirt road flanked by neat rows of palm and eucalyptus trees with homes peeking above concrete walls. I caught a glimpse of the Niger—slow moving, olive green—at the end of the street. A security guard opened the gate. We rolled up a dirt driveway, passed an overgrown garden, and stopped before a half-completed villa. “It belongs to a Savama-DCI family,” Haidara said. Haidara was keeping everything vague, fiercely protective of the network that had participated in the rescue. “People are still at risk,” he had told me earlier.
Haidara instructed me to wait beside a storage shed and disappeared into the house. I studied the detritus scattered on the muddy ground—a one-wheeled, rusted bicycle, a discarded Dell computer—and considered that even in the more prosperous corners of Mali, which are few, everything seemed to fall victim to neglect and decay. After five minutes, Haidara emerged from the house with a key. He opened the storage room, switched on a light, and beckoned me inside. Tidy, ten-foot-high stacks of wooden and metal chests—jammed closely together, four or five stacks deep—filled the musty, fluorescent-lit space and rose to the ceiling. Haidara told me that they represented parts of twenty-six discrete collections, including his own. Thousands and thousands of manuscripts had found a refuge in this fifteen-foot-by-eight-foot room and twenty-five others scattered across Bamako, having escaped the predations of Al Qaeda, and made their way by road or by river past jihadi and Malian army checkpoints, bandits, and French attack helicopters.
The smuggling operation had produced the first systematic effort to describe and document the collections. During the packing in Timbuktu, Haidara, Touré, and other members of the Timbuktu team had compiled a crude handwritten database, registering the names of manuscripts, their owners, and the themes and provenance of every work, which he had later transferred to a laptop. Henry Louis Gates and the Andrew Mellon Foundation had requested that Haidara undertake precisely the same task in 1996, when he had received a grant to build the Mamma Haidara Library. But it had taken the near-destruction of Timbuktu’s manuscripts to prompt him finally to get the job done. Emily Brady called the cataloguing “the first pragmatic step in being able to integrate this knowledge, to transform all this torn-up paper into something meaningful,” a coherent list that could reveal for the first time, to both manuscript owners and the outside world, the depth and breadth of the accumulated scholarship of Timbuktu. Haidara had applied for a $25 million grant from Germany’s Gerda Henkel Foundation so that he could build a sophisticated, computerized catalogue of all 377,000 manuscripts, as well as put into place an ambitious restoration and conservation program. “Abdel Kader knows now for the first time what the hell he has, and it thrills him,” Brady had told me.
I breathed in the stale air. Haidara threw open one ornamented chest to reveal a mass of yellowing, crumbling pages and rotting leather covers stacked one on top of the other, with no protection or padding in between. “The dampness and the rain are hastening the destruction of these and many other manuscripts,” Haidara told me. “They should be returned to Timbuktu as quickly as possible.” The drier air in Timbuktu acted as a kind of safeguard against fungal rot, though the arid climate of his hometown was also deleterious over time, causing unprotected pages to grow brittle and fall apart. “We have begun to see . . . mold, mildew, and fungus on paper and also on leather bindings,” Emily Brady had said in her Reddit interview two months earlier, part of a drive to raise $100,000 to preserve the manuscripts in Bamako by purchasing moisture traps, archival boxes, and additional footlockers.
It was anyone’s guess when their return to Timbuktu would happen. The French army had swept across the north in February and March 2013, liberated Timbuktu and Gao, killed Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, and driven the jihadi army deep into the Sahara. Violence had dropped dramatically, the August election of a new president in Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, a longtime leader of the opposition and a former speaker of the National Assembly, had put the country back on a path toward democracy, and the United Nations had approved a sixteen-thousand-man peacekeeping force, mostly comprised of soldiers from West Africa, to stabilize the north. The French were continuing to pursue notorious jihadis, among them Oumar Ould Hamaha, the influential Belmokhtar deputy known as Red Beard who had terrorized Mohammed Touré that night in Timbuktu—and who would be killed in a French air strike in northeastern Mali a few months after my visit.
But terrorist attacks were continuing sporadically in the north, and at least half a dozen Western hostages remained held in horrific conditions somewhere in the Sahara. The fates of these men varied, depending on the whims of their captors and the willingness of European governments to continue handing over large sums of cash to free them—a practice that, the U.S. State Department and other observers argued, was only strengthening the jihadis and fueling the kidnapping-for-money trade. In July 2013 AQIM shot in the head and killed Philippe Verdon, one of the two French geologists who had been seized from a hotel in Hombori in March 2011, and whom the terrorist group had accused of being a spy. In November 2013, Al Qaeda freed the four French nationals kidnapped at a uranium mine in Niger in 2010, after the French government reportedly paid a $32 million ransom, the highest amount ever given to the terrorist group. The amount was roughly equivalent to what the French had spent on all military operations during the first ten days of Operation Serval. Verdon’s business partner and France’s last remaining hostage, Serge Lazarevic, would be freed in December 2014 in exchange for France’s release of four Islamic militants, including two Al Qaeda members who had participated in the pair’s abduction. In April 2015, French Special Forc
es liberated the Dutchman taken hostage in the Timbuktu guesthouse three and a half years earlier. But his fellow prisoners from South Africa and Sweden are still in Al Qaeda custody.
Despite their sharply reduced mobility, the radicals were still picking off the occasional Westerner who strayed into their path. Three months after my rainy season encounter with Haidara—in November 2013—AQIM militants with connections to Iyad Ag Ghali abducted two French radio correspondents in Kidal, epicenter of rebellions, and a place of continuous unrest. The French army gave chase in jeeps and a helicopter. When the kidnappers’ car broke down eight miles north of the city, they cut the journalists’ throats, shot them, and jettisoned their corpses. Then they escaped into the desert.
Two months later I flew from Bamako to Kidal in a United Nations–chartered Antonov jet with civilian engineers, French officers, and contingents of United Nations soldiers and police from Senegal, Guinea, and Burkina Faso. I was the first correspondent to visit the outpost since the French reporters were murdered. The U.N. civilian staff members who had arranged my trip told me that the place was still so dangerous that I could stay for only twenty-four hours, and could not leave the U.N. compound except in an armored vehicle, with an escort of blue helmets. Stepping off the plane into the blinding sunlight and blast-furnace heat, I watched peacekeepers in turbans roar up in six camouflage-painted trucks with heavy machine guns, protecting the plane from attack. A hot wind was blowing, sending up sprays of sand. In the distance, rising above a sea of scrub, I could see a line of black hills, the Adrar des Ifoghas, where the climactic battle between the jihadists and French expeditionary forces had taken place. “Some of the terrorists have gone back in there,” a French colonel told me, stubbing out a cigarette as he waited to board the plane for Bamako.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 22