The Storied City

by Charlie English

  The men climbed down from the cars, treading carefully over the dark earth. The only flecks of brightness came from the glow of a cigarette or a struck match, but even in the gloom Kalil could make out a large number of armed men, with their ubiquitous Kalashnikovs and heavy turbans, and pickups parked beneath camouflage nets or hidden from the sky by the low desert trees.

  They were led up a dune to where a carpet had been spread. After some time a group approached, led by a pale-faced Tuareg man in his fifties with a smear of dark mustache. He was Mohamed Ag Najim, the ex–Libyan army colonel who was now the senior military commander of the MNLA. He spoke in Arabic, which the leader of the Timbuktu militia translated into French.

  “Welcome,” said Ag Najim. “Please, consider yourselves at home.”

  With the sand and the vehicles and the open sky, the murmuring of conversation, and the calling of a bird in the desert, the delegates felt they were on a film set.

  “What we ask is this,” Kalil said. “Can you spare Timbuktu?”

  “Out of the question,” replied Ag Najim.

  “Then you must give us time to prepare the people so they can decide whether to stay or leave.”

  “How much time?”

  “A month.”

  “Out of the question,” Ag Najim repeated. His men were mobilized and would have been in Timbuktu that night if the city’s leaders hadn’t agreed to parlay. Since they had shown the courage to come, however, he would offer them five days, as long as they met certain conditions, namely that all those who did not want to live in the independent state of Azawad must leave, as must all the Bambara, the dark-skinned southerners who dominated Mali’s administrative class and military. Only then would he promise to enter Timbuktu without shelling it.

  “By Thursday, those who can stay with us in Timbuktu will remain, but those who want to flee must flee,” said Ag Najim.

  It was almost dawn when the delegates hurried back down to their vehicles for the drive to town.

  • • •

  THAT MORNING, Saturday, March 31, Timbuktu awoke to another piece of terrible news: Gao, the largest town in the north and the headquarters of the Malian army in the region, had now fallen.

  Alkadi had a simple thought when he heard this: “Timbuktu is finished.”

  Kalil at this time was racing to find the mayor, Halle Ousmane Cissé, to relay the MNLA’s ultimatum. The rebels were on their way to Timbuktu, Kalil told Mayor Cissé, there was now no question. They had promised not to come till the following Thursday, but Kalil didn’t trust them: they could be here anytime, even today. Mayor Cissé was soon hurrying in turn to meet the senior representatives of the administration—the governor of Timbuktu, Colonel-Major Mamadou Mangara, and the regional military commander, Colonel Gaston Damango—to relay what the MNLA had said: the rebels would enter the town peacefully only if all the soldiers and state workers had left.

  “We must not sacrifice the population,” Mayor Cissé told them. “You have to leave now. If you don’t, who is going to save us?”

  The colonels’ resistance didn’t last long. There was little that they could do, in any case. The junta in Bamako had ordered Malian troops to withdraw from their base at Gao to prevent civilian casualties, and a reinforcement column that reached Timbuktu in the early hours had immediately been ordered to fall back toward the south. It was now retreating in disarray. What hope did that leave for the garrison, already demoralized and weakened by defections and desertions? “After the coup d’état there was no immediate force that could defend Timbuktu, despite the desire that was there,” Mangara recalled. The governor agreed to abandon the city.

  Senior representatives of the state were now informed they should leave and take with them what they could. As word spread that the government was pulling out, panic began to set in.

  That morning, Alkadi was anxious enough to heed his director’s request to remove all the valuables from the Ahmad Baba institute. He climbed on his motorbike and set off from the house he shared with his wife, their two small children, and his brother in the northwestern neighborhood of Abaraju. As he rode through the market to the Ahmad Baba building on the Rue de Chemnitz, he saw people running in every direction, some to pack their families and belongings on the trucks, buses, and 4x4s that were heading south, others to drop their children with friends or relatives who lived in safer areas of town, away from the military camp. Wherever Alkadi stopped, he heard people talking about the best ways to escape. When he reached the institute, he grabbed his laptop, a Canon camera, and a hard drive he had been using to digitize manuscripts, packed them in a bag, and then drove back through the chaos of the market to his house, where he stayed for the rest of the day.

  His brothers in Saudi Arabia, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire had been calling for days, urging him to flee the terrorists. His wife, Fatouma, wanted to leave too, but Alkadi thought these moments of panic were the most dangerous, as that was when people lost their heads. The situation would settle down, he told her, she would see. They sat in front of the TV, flipping between Al Jazeera, France 24, and BBC World News. Sometimes—when their anxiety became too great—they didn’t watch anything at all.

  As afternoon turned to evening the road south from Timbuktu became clogged with people trying to escape, fleeing toward the ferry at Koriume, and the long desert crossing to Douentza and the south. Mangara and Damango left at six p.m. Other soldiers, who couldn’t escape or didn’t want to abandon their families in Timbuktu, quit the army camp and tried to hide among the population. In the hurry to flee their base, they left behind their belongings and equipment: livestock, cooking utensils, television sets. Since there were no clear orders, they also left their stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.

  At dusk, Ismael Diadié Haidara, the proprietor of the Fondo Kati library, went to Sankore to meet his friends, who gathered there every night. The town was now gripped by a sort of “social psychosis,” recalled Ismael, an affable man with small round glasses. Some said the rebels would arrive at any moment; others, that it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t come at all. More than anything, they felt powerless. He thought of his two youngest children, who were with him in Timbuktu, and of the thousands of manuscripts in the library across the courtyard from his house in the eastern neighborhood of Hamabangou.

  At seven p.m. Ismael returned home. When the children were in bed, he went across to the library. He had already moved some of his manuscripts to a hiding place, and now he started to move the rest off the shelves and into lockers. He found it impossible to prioritize—“Which manuscripts can I take? Which ones will I leave for destruction? It is as if you have asked a father to choose between his children, whom he would save and whom he would sacrifice.” He worked until eleven p.m., then went to bed. Across Timbuktu people lay awake, listening to the sounds of the city emptying itself.

  • • •

  IT WAS STILL DARK when Ismael left his house the following morning for a walk in the dunes. He had developed the habit of spending an hour at the break of each day on a circuit of the city, taking in the cool dawn air, the first pale light, and the daily resurrection of life. The street was deserted as he slipped through the door in the outer wall of the compound and set off toward the edge of town. He had not taken more than a few hundred steps when a neighbor spotted him. It was not safe to be out, said the man. “I’m going just for a short walk,” Ismael protested, but the neighbor was insistent, and he decided to turn back. He reentered the courtyard a few minutes later, just as the sun was beginning to rise. When his fourteen-year-old son came out of the house to meet him, they heard the sharp report of two gunshots.

  “Papa, did you hear that? The rebels have come.”

  “I heard it,” Ismael said.

  It was a little after six a.m.

  Minutes later, the rattle of gunfire was shaking people awake all across Timbuktu. Diadié Hamadoun Maiga, a former d
eputy mayor, woke up at home in Sarakeyna, in the east of the city, to hear shots ringing out “all over.” In Abaraju, Alkadi, who had been awake since five, found his morning routine of getting up, praying, and listening to the news interrupted by the crackle of gunfire. Someone told him it was the sound of an airplane, but he knew it wasn’t.

  At Diagayeté’s house near the Sidi Yahya mosque, the family had been woken before dawn by an urgent banging at the door. A neighbor, a military man, pushed in without taking off his shoes or setting down his rifle. “You need to look to save your family,” he said. “We have been instructed to abandon the town.” He left again, to ditch his gun and change out of his uniform, and minutes after that Diagayeté heard a sound he would clearly recall years later: the bok! bok! bok! bok! bok! of an automatic weapon.

  After Ismael had ushered his son inside, he returned to the doorway. From up the street came the roar of vehicles, and then a convoy raced past, heading for the Place de l’Indépendance, the governorate, and the military camp. Others saw gunmen arrive on foot: a group marched up the sandy drive at the low, gray-painted Hôtel Bouctou on the western edge of town and started shooting over the heads of the hotel workers. The men walked into the reception area, with its neat dining tables and red-and-white checkerboard floor, robbed the till of its contents—a measly fifty dollars’ worth of francs—then demanded the keys for the new Land Cruiser that was parked out front, next to a garden planted with Madagascar periwinkle. The owner of the vehicle hurriedly found them, but it soon became clear the gunmen didn’t know how to drive.

  As the shooting escalated, people shut their doors and tried to keep themselves and their children calm. Some prayed. Ismael took his son and daughter into the library, then locked the door and continued the task he had begun the night before, of transferring his manuscripts carefully into lockers. Others went into the street to see what was happening and found pandemonium. Armed men were haring around in pickups, shooting and yelling, while civilians were running in all directions, some trying to leave the city any way they could: by car, motorbike, or donkey, even on foot, though it was 130 miles to the nearest stretch of tarmac road.

  The hysteria caused by the gunmen was “total,” according to Houday Ag Mohamed, one of the few state officials who had not yet fled. It seemed to him a deliberate strategy to scare any remaining Malian soldiers who wanted to fight, and it was working: when he went into the street, he found distressed army recruits struggling to get out of their uniforms, ditch their weapons, and find a hiding place. With his southern neighborhood of Sans Fil vibrating to rhythmic explosions, he hurried back inside and shouted at his family to lock themselves in their rooms since “Hell is not far away!” Soon afterward he heard the low murmur of conversation beneath his window and found a group of soldiers had sneaked into his compound. Anticipating a pitched battle inside their home, his wife announced there was nothing left to do but wait for death. Houday instead cautiously approached the young men, who offered him several chickens and their military vehicles to look after. He refused these gifts and persuaded them to hole up instead in the house of a neighbor who had left.

  All over town soldiers were trying to find shelter. One group showed up at Ismael’s. Thinking his building was already target enough, with its well-known manuscript library and a telephone mast on the roof, he persuaded them to go elsewhere. Other people took soldiers in: Diagayeté, sitting tight with his family, welcomed back his army friend, who was now weaponless and in a civilian T-shirt and trousers. He would stay for several days, along with one of Diagayeté’s colleagues and some students from the Franco-Arab school.

  The looting that had begun at the Hôtel Bouctou was now spreading. The militiamen knew the army camp well from the days when they had trained with government troops, and so they set about taking everything the soldiers had left, from refrigerators and chairs to weapons and crates of ammunition, and loading their loot in pickups and on motorbikes and carrying it off into the desert. The 4x4s were piled so high that one resident watched boxes of grenades topple off, the explosives hitting the ground and rolling around like mangoes fallen from a tree. Vehicles were a particular target for the looters. A line of 4x4s that the Malian military had parked next to the army camp vanished, as did most NGO- and state-owned vehicles.

  That morning, Fatouma Harber, a teacher at the Franco-Arab school, spotted a young man gearing himself up for looting. “If they break open the banks I’m going to look for my share of the money,” he declared. “Otherwise a weapon would do.” He set off in the direction of the camp. A few minutes later, outside a mosque, he fell into an argument with a teenager over a stolen rifle: they were both tugging at it when the boy pressed the trigger and shot him dead.

  Once they had taken as much as they could carry, the gunmen urged the bystanders to help themselves to what remained. Ismael saw people hurrying away with pieces of furniture on their heads. Even small children were among the looting crowds.

  At nine a.m., the town was rocked by a huge explosion. Alkadi heard “one massive bang” and ran into the yard to find the sky filling with black smoke. Ismael, who was much closer to the army camp, felt the house shake. Boubacar Mahamane, a city elder nicknamed “Jansky” after a West African football star of the 1970s, was sitting on his roof terrace in the Grand Marché when he heard the detonation. “Oh, yes,” he thought. “Now the party has really started.” Gunmen trying to shoot the lock off a magazine in the camp had hit the explosives inside, and now shells were flying out in every direction, knocking down sections of the camp wall and landing in houses nearby. Clouds of foul-smelling smoke and fumes drifted south on the breeze, making the air in Sans Fil almost unbreathable.

  For Ismael, this was the bitterest moment of the day, the moment when he realized the town had fallen. “I told myself, there is nothing we can do, truly, everything is lost,” he said.

  • • •

  WHEN DIADIÉ, the former deputy mayor, saw who was doing the shooting, he immediately recognized them as the men of the Arab militia, Delta Force, and knew that Timbuktu had been betrayed. The MNLA were not far behind. On the advice of his brother, a high-ranking police officer, Kalil and his family were taking cover on the ground floor of his house in the Grand Marché when they heard a vehicle pull up outside and a knock at the door. He opened it to find a man wearing the heavy turban of the deep desert.

  “Mohamed Ag Najim is at the entrance to the city and wants to see you now,” the messenger said. “He has some very important information.”

  This was not a good moment, Kalil pointed out, perhaps he could come back another time. But the messenger insisted, and after Kalil’s twenty-five-year-old son volunteered to accompany him, the aging broadcaster reluctantly followed the rebel out into the street.

  They drove out through the chaos—a scene Jansky described as “looking like the end of the world”—to the south of the town, Kalil in a state of growing agitation. Near the stadium on the Kabara road, as they passed a group of pickups filled with masked gunmen careering into the city, he demanded that they go back: “If you do not take me home, I will get out!” The driver refused to stop, so Kalil called Ag Najim at the cellphone number he had been given on the dune outside Ber.

  “I have to go back!” he told the MNLA leader.

  “Come for five minutes,” Ag Najim told Kalil over the din. “I have a very urgent statement that I want you to broadcast.”

  “Brother,” said Kalil, “I do not want to be caught in the crossfire! Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, when things will be calmer, you can call me.”

  Ag Najim agreed, and the driver turned around.

  MNLA trucks were now circling along with the Arab militia. Though it was difficult to tell one armed man from another, the MNLA vehicles carried independence slogans in Arabic and sometimes the green, red, black, and gold MNLA flag, which the fighters raised over the mayor’s office, the governorate, the police station,
and the military camp. The looting now gathered pace as the different groups of gunmen raced one another to the most valuable prizes: state offices, large shops, banks, and public services. Even the governor’s house was stripped.

  By one p.m., the city was exhausted. Seydou Baba Kounta, an unemployed tourist guide known universally as Bastos, watched a group of MNLA arrive at the bank opposite his house and begin to raid it, shooting into the air as they did so. His wife and seven children were in the house, so he marched across the road. “Loot the whole bank, I don’t mind,” he told the gunmen. “But can you stop shooting everywhere?”

  Bursts from small arms continued to rattle across the city into the evening, mingling with the black smoke emanating from the burning camp.

  At four minutes to six, a time that coincided with a lull in gunfire, a statement was released on the rebel Toumast Press website announcing that the MNLA had just put an end to the Malian occupation of Timbuktu. Now, they said, the MNLA flag flew everywhere in the region.

  • • •

  HAIDARA HAD BEEN on the road all day. On Saturday night he had slept in Mopti, the major town of central Mali, and in the morning he pushed on toward Timbuktu. He left his car at Sevare—he had been told that if he took it farther, it was likely to be stolen—and continued on public transport with his driver, moving against the flow of refugees and soldiers heading south. At Douentza, 130 miles from Timbuktu, where the main route to the city left the tarmac and cut across the desert, they found a 4x4 bush taxi that would take them to the river crossing at Koriume. They seemed to be the only people heading north.