Monthly Archives: April 2012

Mali’s Fog of War: Refugees Tell of Terror, Hunger and Rape

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

It took Ibrahim Touré three weeks to escape from Timbuktu after rebels seized the desert town, but, in his heart, he hasn’t really left. The 26-year-old shopkeeper studies the floor as he talks, cradling a welter of scabs and fresh scar tissue on his right elbow. Sometimes he stops to rub his head with an uncertain hand — the unforgiving sun, maybe, or a reaction to the horrors he has witnessed and suffered. If what he says is true, then the fog of war in northern Mali — where Tuareg separatists, Islamic militants, Arab militias and a hodgepodge of terrorist groups are vying for control following a spectacularly successful military campaign — is concealing a grisly spate of human-rights abuses, humanitarian suffering and war crimes.

The shadows were lengthening one Friday after mosque, he relates, when he saw three truckloads of gunmen from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) pounce on two young women. One was an old school friend called Isata, Touré says — a girl who was “always laughing.” The rebels fired wildly in the air and stuck a gun in her face. Hidden in a nomad’s tent, Touré felt his guts contort as he watched them rape her. “I didn’t think these kinds of things could happen in reality,” he says. After the gunmen left the two violated women on the ground, other women went to comfort them. Isata “couldn’t even talk,” says Touré. “Her whole face was destroyed where they’d hit her. There was blood everywhere.”

(MORE: One Foreign Couple’s Escape from Timbuktu)

Touré’s own problems were just beginning. As he surveyed the ruins of his electronics shop days later — looted, he reckons, by MNLA fighters — Islamic militants from a faction called Ansar Eddine took issue with his livelihood. Spotting a computer, they asked him what he wanted with a white man’s things. They knocked him to his knees, gripped his hands and held a flaming torch to his arm. Someone struck him on the leg with a knife. “I was so scared,” he says. “I can’t remember what happened after that.” Hungry, wounded and destitute, Touré has wound up on a dusty sidewalk in Mali’s capital, Bamako, one of hundreds of people arriving each day on overcrowded buses from the country’s disintegrating north. His nephews Oussman and Hamar (ages 12 and 5) lie in the dirt nearby. Their mother died about a month ago from “sickness and starvation.” Continue reading →

Clinging to power

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Economist

EVERY morning a bus caked in dust pulls into Bamako bringing the latest rumours of war. Looking dazed and dehydrated after 24 hours on the road, Mohammad Maiga explains how Tuareg separatists and Islamist militants have turned his native Gao, northern Mali’s most populous town, into a ghost town. “Everyone is leaving,” says Mr Maiga. “There’s no food, no supplies.” Blackouts last all day. Banks and offices have been pillaged by rampant rebels.

Mr Maiga says he saw a truck of National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) rebels abduct three young women on the street in front of his house the day before he fled. “They had no choice,” he explains. “The rebels had weapons.” His claim is impossible to verify but it is one of many alleged instances of murder, robbery and rape laid at the rebels’ door. The UN has called for international action to halt the worsening crisis. Aid agencies reckon that over 200,000 people have been displaced though no one knows the exact numbers.

The clearest winners so far from Mali’s chaos are a trio of jihadist groups—Ansar Eddine, a Salafist outfit that emerged from the secular MNLA’s slipstream; al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb; and another terror group called the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa. The black flag of militant Islam has been spotted over all northern Mali’s big towns and residents say public awareness campaigns about the dictates of sharialaw are underway. Yet far from berating the Islamists for imposing a strict and alien form of Islam, some inhabitants actually offer guarded praise. Ansar Eddine, in particular, they say, is attempting to rein in the MNLA’s rapacious fighters. Continue reading →

Escape from Timbuktu: Foreigners Flee as Mali’s Rebels Declare Independence

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

A handout picture released by Azawad National Liberation Movement (MLNA) on April 2, 2012 and taken in February 2012 reportedly shows MNLA fighters gathering in an undisclosed location in Mali. AFP / GETTY IMAGES

TIME.com

Caked in dust and bristling with weaponry, the Tuareg rebels smiled at Neil Whitehead and Diane English. “It’s okay, we’re here for your protection,” one of the veiled warriors grinned at the nervous couple. Caught up in the middle of a war after Tuareg separatists advanced hundreds of miles in a matter of hours, the hotel-owners had tried twice already to leave their adopted home of Timbuktu. At first, retreating army columns had blocked their way. Then, when the road eventually cleared, English and Whitehead ran straight into a firefight. “There were guns going off all around us and tracer going past the cab windows, and we thought, ‘This isn’t good’,” English says, with a flash of understatement.

Yet the real threat came not from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (known by its French acronym, MLNA)—the 1,000 or so secular Tuareg separatists who Friday declared independence—but Islamist militants and al-Qaeda emirs busy hijacking their campaign. As Timbuktu fell, French diplomats brokered a deal to spirit English, Whitehead, their “leggy, Saharan desert dog” Lily, and a French citizen also trapped in the fabled city to safety. Wearing turbans to disguise themselves and taking only those belongings they could carry, the fugitives piled into Tuareg pickups—and then camped and drove, camped and drove, “belting through the desert hell for leather,” English says.  The rebels “really were fantastic… From the time we put ourselves in their hands… although I knew we weren’t yet safe, I wasn’t really concerned.”

(READ: Gaddafi’s Gift to Mali: The Tuareg Seize Timbuktu.)

Two days and 850 miles of hard driving later, they arrived in Mauritania’s seaside capital of Nouakchott—dusty, tired, rattled—and relieved. “Having a shower and a change of clothes was an absolute luxury,” says English. Yet happy ending aside, the flight through the desert underscores one of the most unsettling aspects of Mali’s Tuareg revolt: how al-Qaeda’s regional franchise has been able to exploit the instability in northern Mali much more, and much faster, than almost anyone anticipated. The first worrying signs emerged Monday with reports that Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the Algerian-born leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had been spotted in Timbuktu, alongside two other prominent AQIM commanders, Abou Zeid and Yahya Abou al-Hammam. “It’s extremely difficult to evaluate the claims and reports coming out of Timbuktu,” says to Andrew Lebovich, an analyst with the Navanti Group who focuses on Sahelian issues. But “multiple sources cite eyewitnesses who say they saw one or several AQIM leaders.” As civilians fleeing Timbuktu impart fresh accounts of what is happening in the desert city, the number of claims is growing steadily. Continue reading →

Food stocks low, fuel hard to find: Mali’s misfortunes worsen as al-Qaeda arrives

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Times

Mali’s two-week-old junta rejected international calls to relinquish power yesterday as sanctions intended to force the new regime to step down began to bite and Islamists cemented their grip in the country’s turbulent north.

In his first comments since the embargo was imposed, the coup leader, Captain Amadou Sanogo, warned that the ousted president, Amadou Toumani Toure, could be charged with “high treason and financial wrongdoing”. He announced that a meeting to discuss Mali’s future would take place tomorrow.

Amid fears that Islamic extremists were taking advantage of the political upheaval, three of al-Qaeda’s leaders were said to have headed to the ancient trading city of Timbuktu, where Sharia was being imposed and women were being told to wear veils. Continue reading →

Fall of Timbuktu to rebels prompts fears for historic treasures

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Times

Rebels in Mali completed their capture of the biggest population centres in the north of the country yesterday by taking the historic trading town of Timbuktu.

Its capitulation, eight days after a coup by junior officers in the capital, Bamako, which overthrew the democratically elected Government, marks the latest gain in a three-day advance by the Tuareg rebels. The junta said that it was seeking to negotiate a peace deal with the rebels and sent representatives to discuss a ceasefire.

The Tuareg forces, thought to be about 1,000, have exploited the uncertainty caused by the overthrow of the Government of President Amadou Toumani Touré, which has left the army with no clear chain of command. Continue reading →

Gaddafi’s Posthumous Gift to Mali: The Tuareg Seize Timbuktu

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

As the hapless junta struggles to establish itself, the northern rebels have captured territory the size of Texas — in just three days

To the din of heavy weaponry looted from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals, Tuareg rebels rode out of the desert to attack the ancient trading city of Timbuktu on Sunday morning, completing a blistering blitzkrieg that has seen them capture the three largest towns in northern Mali in three days. After laying waste to an abandoned military camp, the rebels entered Timbuktu around midday, snarling about in pickups, firing delightedly in the air and planting their black-and-white flag over the offices of the provincial governor, the mayor and the military commandant. They had, they pronounced, lifted Mali’s “occupation” and would henceforth defend and secure Azawad — the name they gave Mali’s northern desert — “for the happiness of its people.” Within a period of 72 hours, they have seized an area the size of Texas.

Yet for all the clamor of battle, it was a quiet word that proved most effective as the Tuareg cut a deal to avoid bloodshed. Government troops garrisoned in Timbuktu may well have fled overnight, but a militia of ethnic Arabs loyal to the regime ensconced in the capital, Bamako, had remained on the ramparts. Fear and uncertainty wracked inhabitants, and many — “even young boys,” according to resident Abu Bakri ag Moha — began arming themselves to battle the Tuareg early Sunday morning, bringing out old Kalashnikovs and bolt-action rifles. But “the deal is the rebels … take Timbuktu and fly their flag for three days, then after they must leave, with the Arabs in control,” one local explained by phone. Time will tell if that’s the exact contract. But for now — Timbuktu has fallen.

(MORE: Mali’s Coup Leader: Interview with an Improbable Strongman)

The conquerors lost little time in pillaging banks, police stations and government offices, but for all that, “the population [doesn't] have any problems,” another resident said. “The rebels haven’t done anything to hurt them. They say, ‘We’re just here for something, and after we will go.’” What plight civilians face in the longer term is harder to say, with an estimated 200,000 displaced by the fighting so far. Oussman ag Isa, an inhabitant of Kidal, the northern administrative center that fell on March 30, said the town was almost deserted and that “people are very hungry, there’s no food, nothing.” The rebels, he added, were still in town. Continue reading →