The Storied City

by Charlie English

  People among the small crowd of Timbuktiens who had gathered to watch began to cry.

  Even two years later, this moment was raw for the grand imam. “When the mausoleums were destroyed, that was the moment when morale dropped,” he said, his voice weary. “For them it is perhaps Islam. The hadiths say that near the end of times Islam will be divided into seventy-three sects, and a single sect will be the real truth. We are witnessing that. Every day you hear a new sect that manifests itself, declaring itself. For them, in their spirit, these things are the truth. People now are so confused.”

  Many blamed the World Heritage Committee. “If UNESCO had not said what they did, the jihadists would not have touched the cultural heritage,” said Air Mali. “Given what UNESCO decreed, they had to attack that which they had forgotten to attack.”

  The Crisis Committee wrote to their contacts in Bamako afterward, asking them to stop denouncing the jihadists’ behavior, while the librarians in Bamako took it as a further spur to try to keep people quiet. “Every time UNESCO spoke about the manuscripts, I phoned them and said, no, you must not speak about the manuscripts,” Haidara said.

  The day after the destruction of the mausoleums, Haidara took a call from a senior UNESCO official in Paris. The organization’s job was to work for global heritage, the official said, and when it was in danger, they were obliged to act. So why did Haidara call them every time they spoke up and tell them to keep quiet?

  “I told him we are in the middle of something very important, and if you continue to speak to the media about the manuscripts, the people there will become aware of what we are doing,” said Haidara. “The next day he called again and told me, ‘Okay, we are going to have a deal between you and me. Every day I am going to call you, you are going to tell us what is happening.’ I said okay.”

  From that moment, the official would call every morning, and Haidara would give him an update. “We had a lot of conversations afterwards,” he remembered. “They understood.”

  Diouara understood something too: the jihadists’ rampage meant they had stopped trying to win over the people of the city. They had given up the pretense and now revealed themselves as they really were. “They had entered into a new phase of the occupation, a decisive phase,” he said. “I understood then that there would be mutilations, whipping, and everything else that was to come.”

  • • •

  THE OUTPOURING of fury that rained down on the jihadists came from all quarters and all corners of the globe. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) declared the destruction of the mausoleums a war crime, which her office had authority to investigate. Six West African leaders issued a statement encouraging the ICC to take action and called on Mali to ask the UN to intervene militarily against the groups in northern Mali. The U.S. State Department “strongly condemned” the destruction, while Russia described it as a “barbarian” act that could “only arouse indignation.” For France it was “intolerable,” a “systematic violation of places of reverence and prayer,” which for centuries had been part of the soul of the famed sub-Saharan city. At Paris’s request, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2056, which called for sanctions on the jihadists responsible and condemned “the desecration, damage and destruction of sites of holy, historic and cultural significance” in the city.

  In southern Mali the reaction was equally hostile. On July 4, Muslim leaders in Bamako marched against the Islamists in the north. “No to imported Islam, yes to the Islam of our parents,” read one slogan, while a protester explained that “Timbuktu was founded on a pure Islam, respectful of men, of all men.” The culture minister, Diallo Fadima Touré, called on the UN to “take concrete steps to stop these crimes against the cultural heritage of my people.” Even the MNLA, without irony, called for international intervention, asking for “the USA, France and all other countries who want to stand against Ansar Dine, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda who are now holding Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal to help us kill them and help the people in those cities.”

  The most unlikely outburst, however, came from the hideout, probably in the Kabylie mountains east of Algiers, of the AQIM leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel.

  To mark the start of the holy month of Ramadan on July 20, the emir and his advisers put the finishing touches to an eighty-page memo titled “General Guidelines Concerning the Islamic Jihadist Project in Azawad” and fired it off to his commanders in Mali. Pages of this internal document would not be seen by the wider world until the following year, when it was found by reporters digging through the rubble and paperwork Timbuktu’s occupiers had left behind. The document was carefully structured, with criticism bracketed fore and aft by positive remarks about the great opportunity of the “new baby” of the Islamic Azawad project. In parts it included the sort of business-speak one might find in a company report: there were several mentions of “external stakeholders” and warnings against “high visibility on the current political and military stage,” as well as concerns about the al-Qaeda brand. The gist of the memo was clear: AQIM’s Saharan branch was in danger of screwing up this whole jihadist project.

  The great powers might not be in a position to use force because of the exhaustion of their armies and the ongoing global financial crisis, Droukdel wrote, but they would nevertheless try to hinder the creation of an Islamic state of Azawad. It was probable—even certain—that they would undertake some sort of military intervention or exert pressure through a complete economic, political, and military embargo, at which point AQIM’s brigades would be forced to retire to their bases in the desert. Bearing in mind that al-Qaeda was a red rag to the West, it was vital that they disguise themselves. “Be silent and make it look as if you are a ‘domestic’ movement that has its own causes and concerns,” Droukdel advised. “Foreign intervention will be imminent and rapid if we [AQIM] have a hand in government and our influence is clearly asserted.”

  They must also avoid taking risks. The speed with which AQIM’s local commanders were moving against the Islam of the region was a huge mistake. “Among your foolish policies,” Droukdel noted in one scathing paragraph, was “the rush to apply sharia without taking into account the principle of progressive application in an environment where the populations have not known religious precepts for centuries.” Previous experience had proved that applying sharia in this way “will lead to people’s rejecting the religion, and engender hatred toward the mujahideen.” It would, consequently, lead to the failure of “our experiment.”

  Specific examples of this hastiness, which he and AQIM’s ruling council ordered them not to repeat, included the destruction of the mausoleums and the imposition of the hadd punishments. Of the decision to smash the mausoleums, he wrote: “We are not powerful enough today, foreign intervention is imminent and the people have known the Islamic conquest for only a short time. . . . The side effects of this action are not trivial and we will not be forgiven if we carry on in this way.” But their “gravest error” was the falling-out with the MNLA, who were necessary partners in the struggle to achieve al-Qaeda’s aims, even if they did not appear natural friends. Droukdel despaired at the breakdown of agreements with them and with the Arab rebel movement. These groups, he wrote, should be used to build the state and defend against foreign intervention. In his eyes, the agreement that had been drawn up between the MNLA and al-Qaeda was a great “conquest” that surpassed all AQIM’s hopes for a movement that supposedly had secular tendencies.

  In sum, while al-Qaeda should lend its resources to the state of Azawad, it was in neither its interest nor its capacity to govern the territory when its overriding objective was global jihad. It should therefore keep to the background, supporting a government of Azawad led by Iyad Ag Ghaly and Ansar Dine, but which included representatives of all communities in the north—the MNLA, the Arabs, the Songhay, and the Fulani—and focus its energies on the big picture.

  “Finally,” he concluded, “we consi
der these directives and this general vision as the best way of avoiding the errors of the past, which we hope not to make again.”

  At whom was Droukdel’s memo aimed? Surely not Abou Zeid, a Droukdel protégé whose kidnappings had dramatically raised the organization’s profile and its cash reserves. More likely it was Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed commander who led the fighting against the MNLA in Gao. Belmokhtar would soon split with AQIM altogether to set up the rival Signers in Blood brigade, and would write to the global leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, telling him that Droukdel was deeply out of touch. Given that jihadists had already dragged the body of Colonel Bouna Ag Teyib through the streets of Gao and forced the MNLA’s secretary-general to flee his headquarters, he had a point: the moment for patching up relations with the MNLA was surely long gone.

  Whatever AQIM’s Saharan commanders thought of the emir’s words, they had little effect. Locked on their path, administering a territory where it was a struggle to keep the lights on, Timbuktu’s new leaders moved even more quickly than before.

  • • •

  FOR THE LIBRARIANS IN BAMAKO, the evacuation was growing urgent. Haidara spent his days in a cycle of fruitless fund-raising meetings. He toured the embassies again, contacting “friends of Mali” (“Mali,” said Haidara, “has many friends”) to see if anything had changed, but these contacts gave the same response over and over: “It was ‘No, no, no, we cannot do anything like that,’” he recalled. “That’s the national heritage of Mali, we are friends of Mali, and if our country starts to help you do that, Mali will start accusing us. We cannot get mixed up in that.” It seemed to him that his contacts were no longer talking to him in the same respectful tone they had once used. Finally, one “friend” explained to him that the international partners had no confidence in what was being done in the country, so they would not spend money there. Haidara felt he had been duped.

  “I understood many things,” he said. “It reminded me of many meetings that I had had with other people. They were not open with us.”

  The librarians tried a new tack after that, making appointments with the senior figures in the Malian government in charge of heritage. They began with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the government department responsible for the Ahmad Baba institute. The Timbuktu manuscripts were threatened, Haidara told them, but the librarians did not have the means to save them. “What are you going to do to help?”

  “The way I see you today, I know you are serious,” the secretary-general of the department told him. “But I am going to tell you something. We cannot help you politically, or materially, in any way. The only thing I can tell you is that all you are able to do in this business, you must do it. We are behind you.”

  Next they went to the Ministry of Culture, which oversaw the private manuscript collections. Haidara gave the same speech and got the same answer. You need to do it, he recalled being told, we are behind you. “I told them I would try,” Haidara said, “but I wanted them to be aware of it, because if there were problems they had to help me.” The officials agreed.

  With the backing of the ministries, Haidara now called his contacts abroad. He had a friend in Geneva who told him to come to Switzerland, and even paid for his plane ticket. Haidara spent several days there, meeting people who dealt with world heritage, including some who had worked to save manuscripts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They told him he should start the operation soon, but take it slowly and carefully. Even if he managed to smuggle only a single manuscript out of the city each day, it would be worthwhile. One woman gave him a piece of advice that would stick with him. “She said you must never lose someone who starts to work with you,” he recalled. “You must always keep them happy, even if it is not in your interest, even if they make wrong calculations. She said it to me three times.”

  He returned from Switzerland with a lot to think about, but he still had no money.

  Ismael at that time also wanted to travel. For a man who liked to spend an hour every morning and evening walking in the open desert around Timbuktu, Bamako was claustrophobic. The village Mungo Park had passed through in 1796 was now a city of more than two million, and thousands more were arriving from the north every week. Its cinder-block homes stretched for twenty miles; its streets and bridges were crowded with honking vehicles that coughed brown smog into the humid air. Ismael’s sense of being choked was compounded by the political tension that occasionally spilled over into gunfights in the streets, including an attempted countercoup by the deposed president’s guard that left fourteen people dead.

  “I was not good in Bamako,” he said.

  Exiled from Timbuktu, with the manuscripts of his Fondo Kati library hidden, he had little to tie him to Mali and its crisis. He decided to return to his second home, in Andalusia.

  The other librarians understood. “It happened that our friend Ismael was tired,” said Haidara. “He said, ‘Good. I am going to let you carry on.’”

  “The truth was that when we were looking for solutions, Ismael had no problem,” Maiga said. “He was with us to give us ideas. By the time we made the decision to intervene, he was already in Spain. He had secured his manuscripts before going, and he left.”

  He did not come back.

  • • •

  BY JULY, Alkadi was also in Bamako. The Ahmad Baba researcher with the easy smile and the sleepy eyes had left Timbuktu with his family in late April. After a nightmarish bus journey that lasted almost a week, they reached Segu, where he found a cheap house to rent. But there was nothing for him to do there, and with no money coming in, he and Fatouma decided in June that he should go to Bamako. Every day Alkadi went to offer himself for employment in the small first-floor offices in Kalaban Coura that the director, Maiga, had hired. Even here, there wasn’t much work: the only materials the institute had were a few digitized documents that had been brought south on hard drives, plus several hundred manuscripts Maiga had acquired in Bamako.

  On July 23, however, Maiga called Alkadi in. There was something very difficult that he needed to ask him, but he had to be very discreet.

  “No problem,” said Alkadi. “If I can do it, it’s not a problem. I will try.”

  The director related some of what Haidara had learned on his Swiss trip: how manuscript libraries suffered catastrophic losses during the Iraq War, and how others had been destroyed in Sudan and Libya. The institute’s manuscripts were also now at risk of being destroyed, Maiga said: if the Islamists didn’t do it, there was a strong chance the MNLA might.

  “What I want you to do,” he concluded, “is bring the manuscripts out of the libraries in Timbuktu.”

  “No problem,” said Alkadi.

  It was typical of Alkadi to respond in a calm, even cool, manner, which was why Maiga had asked him. The director was still new in his job, but he had taken soundings among senior staff in Timbuktu as to who could be trusted with a special and sensitive mission, and Alkadi’s name had been the first on the list. Two other agents would accompany him. One was Abdoulaye Sadidi, who also had the reputation of being levelheaded. The third was someone whom neither of them knew well, but who would be invaluable since he was the manager of the Ahmad Baba library: Bouya Haidara.

  Maiga asked Alkadi to call in the other two; then he laid out the plan.

  The “agents” should make their way to Timbuktu, where they would contact Abba Traoré, the caretaker at the old building on the Rue de Chemnitz, and tell him to let them into the depository at the back. There they would pack up a few hundred manuscripts—they would have to make their own decisions about which, but he would prefer them to pick the less valuable ones, or those for which there were multiple copies, in case they were lost—and bring them to Bamako. They should avoid traveling back together, since if one of them was caught, they could lose everything. Each agent should also have a cover story in case he was challenged. (Alkadi’s was that he had asked
for a leave of absence from the institute to visit his brother, who was still living in Timbuktu.) Finally, Maiga said, they must not tell anyone, not even their closest relations, where they were going or what they were planning to do there.

  “I know that the people of Timbuktu and Gao have a mouth,” he said, “but I want you to close yours.”

  The director had no money for the mission since his funding was still blocked, so he paid for their journey from his own resources. He drove them to the bank up the road and withdrew a substantial sum, handing 100,000 West African francs ($170) to each agent. Then he told them to go home and pack.

  At three p.m. the following day, the agents carried their bags to the Sogolon roundabout, with its giant sculpture of a water buffalo, and boarded a bus bound for Mopti.

  • • •

  TRAVELING IN MALI was hard in the calmest of times. The vehicles were slow, their springs broken, the seats uncomfortable and the tires dangerously bald, and even though bush mechanics worked miracles, breakdowns dogged almost every journey. There were only 3,400 miles of tarmac in a country twice the size of France, and trucks and vans competed on them with speeding cars, overladen donkey carts, pedestrians, and cyclists, dodging broken-down buses and the corpses of animals. Despite the country’s lack of roads, a Malian was almost seven times as likely to die in a car accident as a Briton, and a little over twice as likely as an American.

  The stress of the journey was made worse by the agents’ mission. To enter jihadist territory was risky enough; how much worse it was to be traveling with illicit intent, no matter how noble, that could lead to imprisonment, amputation, or death. On the way north, the men examined the checkpoints they would have to cross with their cargo on the way south. At Douentza, where their route left the tarmac, they saw their first jihadists. “They were everywhere,” Alkadi recalled. There were additional checkpoints a hundred miles north, at Bambara Maounde, and just south of the river. At each stop they had to show their ID cards and answer the jihadists’ questions. Who are you? Where are you going? What’s your business?