Tag Archives: al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

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 →

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 Coup Leader: Interview with an Improbable Strongman

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

Captain Amadou Sanogo does not sound or look like the man in charge. But he is now the only show in town in a country beset by multiple crises

Under a sickle moon a large man with dreadlocks, a sparkling purple cloak and white moccasins climbed the stairs of the house that has become Mali’s new nerve-center. He was a marabout — a West Africa holy man — summoned by the 40-year-old army captain everyone in Kati is now calling le President. The new power in Mali is Amadou Sanogo, a career soldier whose improbable coup d’etat has upturned one of Africa’s strongest democracies. On Monday night he sought strength from the spirit world. He needs whatever help he can get.

It is a week since Sanogo led a mutiny at the garrison in Kati — a sleepy commune of cinder-block bungalows just north of the capital — that intensified into a coup. Swiftly condemned by the international community for daring to upset a rare — if perhaps superficial — African success story, Sanogo and his junta, the self-importantly named Comite national pour le redressement de la democratie et la restauration de l’ Etat (CNRDRE for short), must work out quickly how to cope with a sudden halt in economic and military assistance at a time when Tuareg rebels wage a devastating blitzkrieg in the north, protesters march and public figures bewail democracy’s death.

At the two-story house in Kati, formerly the camp commandant’s headquarters, Sanogo meets with a flurry of diplomats, soldiers and power-brokers, who wait on a first-floor verandah lined with ornamental plants. He smiles bashfully as he shakes the Algerian ambassador’s hand, as though he’s still growing into the role he’s plucked for himself. There’s a hint of the young Vladimir Putin, trying to project a persona that’s bigger than he is, and it’s easy to see why his American mentors (he attended multiple training programs in the U.S.) never marked him out as future leadership material as, apparently, is the case. Continue reading →

As the U.S. and al-Qaeda Watch Mali’s Phony Peace, Tension Mounts in Timbuktu

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

Several interested parties await the outcome as a once-healthy democracy descends into conflict between military mutineers and their president

Pick-ups packed with soldiers zoomed toward the maize-colored building that houses the State broadcaster as rumors flew of more civil strife in Mali. There was a counter-coup. No, there wasn’t a counter-coup. The leader of the mutiny was dead. No, Capt. Amadou Sanogo would appear in a broadcast momentarily.

As soldiers looted petrol stations, hijacked cars and went joyriding, I had my own run-in with trouble. A rangy-looking man with knotted stubble snatched a tattered banknote from my hand as I bought a soda. “There are no police,” the thief snarled, angrily, as we came close to blows. “You, I’m going to kill you,” he shouted. It was one of countless incidents underscoring the security vacuum in Mali, until three days ago one of Africa’s best functioning democracies.

Some of that anxiety receded over the course of Saturday, with shops re-opening for business, and a semblance of normality in Bamako’s grand marche, where hairdressers’ were packed, shopkeepers traded good-natured insults with each other and TIME saw one fashion-conscious diva batting her false eyelashes in the air as a beautician applied henna to her hands. Continue reading →