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Destroying Timbuktu: The Jihadist who Inspires the Demolition of the Shrines

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

This TV grab shows Omar Hamaha, military chief of the Islamist group Ansar Eddine, gesturing on April 3, 2012 in Timbuktu. AFP / GETTY IMAGES

TIME.com

The charismatic military leader of Salafist rebels in Mali may just be helping to found an Islamic caliphate but he is also taking apart an ancient city’s heritage.

Oumar Ould Hamaha is a one-man whirlwind of piety and fury. For more than a decade he has —  by his own account and others — raided government outposts in Mauritania, Algeria and Niger; held Western hostages for extravagant ransoms, and proselytized a ferocious asceticism over the barrel of a gun. Riding with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, he crisscrossed the shadowless Sahara in the service of a god he envisioned as unforgiving as the desert itself. He invoked Koranic verses to protect himself from the “evil work of devils” and “the biting of snakes and scorpions,” learned to navigate by the sun, moon and stars, and believed that meteor showers were battles between djinns and angels. It has been a ferocious transformation for a former student of accounting.

Since April, Hamaha, a man with a flaming red tuft of a beard and an oratorical style to match, has emerged as one of the most visible figures of the Islamist takeover of Mali’s ethnic Tuareg rebellion–even though he is an ethnic Arab. Clad in a camouflage smock and turban and clutching his Kalashnikov, he has become a familiar sight on the streets of Timbuktu. Residents say he mixes his fiery sermons with small acts of kindness — and poses for photos. He is implacably bound to a 21st Century re-imagining of 7th Century Islam. “We are fighting in the name of religion,” he tells TIME by phone from Timbuktu, in one of several conversations over recent weeks that paint a rare portrait of the jihadist. “You know,” he says, “Our struggle has just begun.”

(LIST: Timbuktu – The Most Influential Places in History)

He has championed the demolition of several Muslim mausoleums that UNESCO had declared historic. He said the destruction was justified on the grounds that “those who believe” in the veneration of such shrines “are driven by Satan.” On Tuesday, the Islamists in Timbuktu reportedly destroyed two more tombs at the 14th Century Djingareyber mosque.”It’s forbidden by Islam to pray on tombs and ask for blessings,” says Hamaha, “Ansar Eddine is showing the rest of world, especially Western countries, that whether they want it or not, we will not let the younger generation believe in shrines as God, regardless of what the U.N., UNESCO, International Criminal Court or ECOWAS [the Economic Community of West African States] have to say. We do not recognize these organizations. The only thing we recognize is the court of God, shar’ia. Shar’ia is a divine obligation, people don’t get to choose whether they like it or not.” Continue reading →

The jihadists’ frightening new front

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Economist

Extreme Islamists are threatening the region—and an ancient African heritage

LEGEND held that the main gate of Timbuktu’s Sidi Yahya mosque, a wood-panelled affair with metalwork cast in the shape of crescent moons, would open only at the end of time. In a metaphorical sense that is what Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda who control the ancient trading-post in northern Mali have now unleashed on the city. On July 2nd they battered down the ancient entrance with picks and shovels to “destroy its mystery” as part of a city-wide programme of cultural vandalism inspired by religious zeal that has left inhabitants aghast with horror. Destroyed, too, are eight mausoleums and a number of saints’ tombs. More wreckage is feared.

“Everyone is furious with the Islamists,” says Assane Traore, a tour guide in happier times. “It’s as if they are hacking off parts of our bodies.” Some residents say they want to demonstrate against “the bearded ones”, says Mr Traore, but many are too fearful. In its heyday Timbuktu was a hub of learning that grew rich on duties from the trans-Saharan trade in gold, ivory, salt and slaves. When the mysticism of wandering Sufis fused with pre-Islamic beliefs, it became known as the “City of 333 Saints”.

Two armed groups that dominate the town—Ansar Eddine and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, known in security circles as AQIM—reckon such reverence is unIslamic idolatry. “All of this is haram (forbidden),” scolded a militant spokesman, who threatened to destroy every tomb in the city “without exception”. Irina Bokova, head of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, has called the demolition “an attack against the physical evidence that peace and dialogue are possible.” Scholars fear that tens of thousands of brittle manuscripts collected in the city in its zenith, arguably Africa’s greatest ancient literary heritage, are at risk too. Continue reading →

An unholy alliance

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Economist

Tuareg rebels and al-Qaeda unite to create a fierce new state in the north

GUNFIRE pierced the night quiet. For weeks, inhabitants of the ancient desert towns of Gao and Timbuktu had feared that rival Tuareg rebels would clash. Between January and March they had together waged a devastatingly effective campaign against Mali’s army, sending its last troops packing in early April and proclaiming an independent state called Azawad. But the rivalry then flared, and lawlessness and factionalism have been rife since.

Machinegun bursts on May 26th sent residents scurrying for cover. But the shooting turned out to be celebratory. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, a secular group known by its French initials, MNLA, had cut a deal with Islamic fundamentalists from a locally dominant lot called Ansar Eddine. The pair agreed to join forces and set up a transitional government. Peace would follow.

Yet residents still have reason to be scared. Ansar Eddine has become almost indistinguishable from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). This is the closest to government that al-Qaeda, under any guise, has ever come. Though the nomadic Tuareg and other ethnic groups of northern Mali number only 1.3m people, the area they now control is as big as France. Continue reading →

Is Al-Qaeda Beefing Up Its Presence in Mali?

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

Ali Cissé, 30, a shopkeeper, couldn’t contain his curiosity when a new wave of gunmen rolled into town. Outside the governor’s compound in downtown Gao — a dusty administrative center of adobe architecture and open skies — he saw a fleet of armored vehicles with foreign fighters standing guard. “I saw [militants] from Niger, Pakistan, Algeria, Mauritania [and] Tunisia,” Cissé tells TIME by phone from northern Mali. “I identified them by their accents because they like approaching people… to try to win their [sympathy].” Whatever their provenance, the fighters had one thing in common: they rode with Ansar Eddine, a group at times almost indistinguishable from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the regional terror franchise.

Ever since a motley combination of Tuareg separatists and Islamic supremacists swept through northern Mali in a blaze of gunfire, an echo-chamber of rumor, gossip and misinformation has supplanted hard facts, and it’s worth treating all information — however credible the source — with caution. But it isn’t just Cissé claiming that foreign Islamic militants are flocking to this latest of troublespots. In the fabled waystation of Timbuktu, 300 miles upriver from Gao, a tour guide called Buba tells TIME that “Algerian nationals” are prevalent among the armed groups controlling the city. Taken with other reported sighting of foreign Islamist supremacists arriving in northern Mali, it’s one of a number of signs that will have al-Qaeda watchers wondering whether northern Mali is becoming a new jihadist playground — even as the U.S. and its allies move against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and a relentless drone campaign batters the badlands of Pakistan’s Northwest frontier.

If Cissé kept a diary, it would provide a troubling record of the power struggle between secular Tuareg separatists and a host of religiously-inspired militants seeking to impose Shar’ia across the region. The day after Cissé saw holy warriors in downtown Gao, the 30-year-old shopkeeper says he picked his way through a military base that until recently housed U.S. special forces training the Malian army — but has now been laid waste by the various armed groups that have seized northern Mali. The next day, protesters took to the streets of Gao chanting, “Down with Ansar Eddine and the MNLA” — the initials of the secular group vying with the Islamists for supremacy and blamed for the prevailing lawlessness. On Wednesday, May 16, Cissé says that “sporadic gunfire” continued as the Islamists and gunmen from the MNLA dispersed crowds by firing over them. Continue reading →

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 →