The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  We crossed a sandy field and entered a tin-roofed shack, Mohammed’s Centre de Recherche. Mohammed opened a trunk at my feet and took out dozens of volumes that he had recovered from the desert. He touched them reverently. “Dust is the enemy of these manuscripts,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Dust eats away at them and destroys them over time.” I picked up a miniature Koran from the fifteenth century, thumbed through it and stared in amazement at an illustration of the Great Mosque of Medina: a minutely rendered, pen-and-ink depiction by an anonymous artist of Saudi Arabia’s stone-walled fortress, two pencil-thin minarets rising over the central golden dome, date palm trees at the fringes of the mosque, and desert mountains in the distance. “You are one of the first outsiders to see this,” he told me.

  After I returned to Timbuktu, Abdel Kader Haidara led me down sandy alleys crisscrossed by a tangle of phone wires, past teetering, two- and three-story structures of mud brick and limestone, everything the same oppressive beige. The few splashes of color that brightened the landscape came from the fiery red jerseys of a soccer team practicing in a sandy field, the lime green facade of a grocery store, and the peacock blue boubous, or flowing Malian gowns, of the local Tuareg and Sorhai men.

  We entered the tiled and acacia-shaded courtyard of the Mamma Haidara Library. Haidara led me through traditional Moorish wooden doors, inlaid with dozens of ornamental silver knobs. Inside the sun-splashed exhibition hall, financed by the Ford Foundation, the best of Haidara’s archive was neatly arranged in vacuum-sealed glass cases: he showed me a fourteenth-century Koran, a work of astronomy opened to a chart of the heavens, and an 1853 epistle by spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Al Bakkay Al Kounti, in which he asks the sultan of Massina to spare the life of the German explorer Heinrich Barth. Non-Muslims were barred from entering the city under the sultan’s harsh Islamic rule, but Al Bakkay argued that religious law forbade Barth’s execution. “It is forbidden to be unjust against an infidel whoever he may be, fighter or nonfighter, who has entered the lands of Islam with a safe conduct given to him by a Muslim,” Al Bakkay wrote. Barth remained under the protection of Al Bakkay and made it back to Europe unharmed. “The manuscripts show that Islam is a religion of tolerance,” said Haidara. “We need to show the West the truth.”

  However, it was not the only truth in Timbuktu. On the northeast edge of town, a short drive down a sand track from Haidara’s home, a new construction project was rising in the dunes: a large, butterscotch-and-peach-painted concrete mosque. Wealthy members of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had built the multimillion-dollar edifice. It had Moorish archways, a green-copper dome topped by a crescent moon, a forty-foot-high minaret, and five loudspeakers that blared the Koran in all directions. Without yet attracting much attention from the outside world, the Wahhabis were trying to export their hard-line Islam to the Sahara.

  One hundred years earlier, the French journalist and historian Félix Dubois had cited “the influence of the Arabian Mussulman” on the two waves of Malian jihadis who had imposed Shariah law on Timbuktu in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Muhammad Abd Al Wahhab, an eighteenth-century preacher from the desert interior of what is now Saudi Arabia, had urged a return to the austere Islamic society created by the Prophet following the Hejira, his migration to Medina from Mecca in 622 CE. Al Wahhab’s followers rejected modernism and secularism, supported the imposition of Shariah, called for a restricted role for women, and aspired to create an Islamic caliphate modeled after the seventh-century religious state ruled by the Prophet and his successors. Al Wahhab declared holy war on Shi’ism, Sufism, and Greek philosophy. He formulated the doctrine known as takfir, by which he and his followers could designate as an infidel, and punish with death, any Muslim who refused to pledge allegiance to the caliph, the leader of the Sunni Islamic world, or who venerated any entity other than God. In the nineteenth century Malian Sufis had come into contact with these Arabian zealots during the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and grafted their rigid ideology and culture of intolerance onto Niger River cultures raised on Sufism, animism, and a syncretic blend of the two. With these Malian jihadis, dedicated to the “purification” of Islam through the implementation of Shariah law, the two interpretations of the religion came into violent conflict. Now, more than a century and a half later, history was seeking to repeat itself.

  That evening, I sat at the outdoor bar of the Hotel Bouctou, Timbuktu’s oldest tourist lodge, at the edge of the Sahara. Tuareg nomads draped in boubous; Westernized locals in jeans and college T-shirts; and foreign tourists swayed to the recorded music of Ali Farka Touré. In the fading light, almost nobody seemed to notice the five young Americans with close-cropped hair and trim physiques nursing Castel beers at a table in the corner. The men were U.S. Special Forces instructors dispatched to Mali to train the country’s ill-equipped army to confront a growing terrorist threat in the desert. “They’ve taken over a block of the Hotel Bouctou, and they keep to themselves,” Azima Ali, a Tuareg tour guide, whispered to me as the call of the muezzin from Timbuktu’s dozens of mosques rose over the alleys in the darkness.

  In recent months Western and Malian officials had detected a surge of Islamist recruitment efforts in the Malian Sahara. The Malian government had closely followed the travels of several itinerant imams from Pakistan who proselytized throughout the north. “They’ve let the Pakistanis know they’re not welcome,” one American official had told me in Bamako. Salafis from Saudi Arabia—fundamentalist Muslims who extol a return to the Islam practiced by the Prophet and his original followers, the Salaf, or ancestors—had constructed Wahhabi mosques both in Timbuktu and other desert communities, founded orphanages, and lavished cash on local charities. “The north is huge and impoverished, with lots of unemployed and angry young men,” the American diplomat in Bamako had told me. “The potential for the exploitation of disenfranchised youth definitely exists.”

  The imam of the new Wahhabi mosque in Timbuktu, a member of the local Sorhai tribe, had succeeded in attracting two dozen residents of Timbuktu to Friday prayers, my driver, Baba, told me, including some young men who had proudly displayed Osama bin Laden T-shirts after the attacks of September 11. But Azima Ali, the Tuareg tourist guide, insisted that the imam’s message was still unpopular in Timbuktu. “The people here are not extremists,” he said. “The kind of Islam that we practice is generous and kind. We don’t believe in spreading the religion through violence. If you are not a Muslim, nobody can force you to be one.”

  After our visit to the Saudi-built mosque, Baba and I drove through the center of town. We passed Timbuktu’s renowned Djingareyber Mosque, the imposing fourteenth-century mud fortress. “As long as this mosque rises over the city,” Baba told me, “the Wahhabis can never be strong.” But a few moments later, a jeepload of Malian soldiers roared past, kicking up clouds of dust, back from a military exercise in the Sahara with U.S. trainers. Baba watched them somberly. “We are glad to have the Americans here,” he murmured. “Who knows what is happening in the desert?”

  6

  General Charles F. “Chuck” Wald, the deputy commander of the United States European Command, based in Vaihingen, Germany, on the eastern outskirts of Stuttgart, was a burly ex-college football star from North Dakota with a hard-charging manner that both inspired and intimidated his underlings. After being selected in the fourteenth round of the NFL draft as a wide receiver by the Atlanta Falcons in 1969, Wald had opted instead for a career as a pilot in the Air Force. He had flown or directed combat missions in every U.S. military campaign since the late 1960s, a distinction that had prompted one defense expert to call him “the Zelig of airpower”—referring to the Woody Allen character with a knack for being present at one momentous event after another during the 1920s and 1930s. Wald flew light aircraft into combat over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; and directed aerial raids on Muammar Al Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli in 1986 following a Libyan terrorist attack on a Berlin nightclub that killed two U.S. soldiers. A deca
de later, at the end of the Bosnian war, he bombed Serb ammunitions depots in Bosnia-Herzegovina from an F-16. He had been the Air Force point man in Afghanistan, overseeing 35,000 men and 350 aircraft in the campaign to destroy the Taliban.

  At the time that Wald arrived in Vaihingen, in 2002, responsibility for conducting U.S. military operations in Africa was divided among three Unified Commands, with the European Command in charge of West Africa. (Five years later Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would create the Africa Command, basing it in Stuttgart after no African government would accept a permanent U.S. military presence on its soil, and placing the entire continent under its supervision.) Wald spent much of his time monitoring a worsening crisis in the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria, where rebel groups and criminals were kidnapping American oil workers and holding them for multimillion-dollar ransoms. Wald also spotted the potential for trouble in what he called the “vast, ungoverned spaces” of the Sahara. Arab racketeers were making tens of millions of dollars a year running cigarettes, drugs, weapons, and illegal immigrants from Mali and Niger to North Africa and across the Mediterranean to Europe. Some smugglers had links to the Islamist rebel groups that had waged a brutal civil war against the Algerian regime in the 1990s in which tens of thousands of civilians had been killed. The nexus of money, weapons, crime, and radical Islam was worrying the Algerians, and the Americans, who passed on intelligence to them and helped them with border surveillance, shared their concern.

  In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the George W. Bush administration’s war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Wald believed that the Sahel region was fertile ground for jihadism. The U.S. military had driven Al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors out of Afghanistan, depriving it of its main safe haven; the Islamist government of Sudan, which had protected bin Laden for five years during the 1990s, had expelled him under U.S. and Saudi pressure in 1996, and made it clear that the terrorist group was no longer welcome there. That left the radicals with reliable refuges only in Yemen, where a weak regime had ceded control of the mountains east of the port of Aden to the jihadis, and the “Wild West” of the Sahara—especially Mali. As a part of the peace deal signed with the Tuareg rebels in 1996, Malian authorities had agreed to draw down their military presence in the region north of Timbuktu, and there was also a tacit understanding that they would not interfere with the Tuaregs’ traditional source of income, the smuggling of contraband across the porous desert borders, often in league with Arab tribesmen. After the Malian army retreated in the mid-1990s, the area became an ever-wilder no-man’s-land, and extremist elements had moved into the vacuum. Mali was a forerunner of other collapsing states such as Syria, where the loss of power of the beleaguered regime of Bashar Al Assad in 2012 and 2013 allowed the radical group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to gain supremacy over a large swath of ungovernable territory.

  In early 2003, U.S. intelligence services delivered to Wald a set of grainy photographs taken by a “spy in the sky” satellite. The images showed dozens of armed men lined up in neat rows at a desert training camp north of Timbuktu. In a safe room in the headquarters of the European Command—a leafy complex of beige-concrete buildings, built for the Nazi war machine in 1936, and occupied by the United States Third Army after World War II—Wald held the photos up to the light. He scrutinized the elements: semiautomatics, a remote desert setting, men who appeared to be Islamist fighters, some of them on horseback. The images looked almost exactly like the surveillance photos that he had often analyzed of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. It’s a military formation, he thought. It looks like terrorist training. The photos were too grainy to make out individual faces. But intercepts of satellite phone calls and other intelligence, Wald told me years later, suggested that the commander of the group was the Sahara’s most notorious outlaw, an individual destined to become a leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali: Mokhtar Belmokhtar.

  Belmokhtar, thirty, was born and grew up in Ghardaïa, a dusty town of high unemployment and smoldering antigovernment resentments, in the M’Zab Valley in the Algerian Sahara, 370 miles south of Algiers. “It’s too bad that there’s no ocean here,” runs a typical youthful lament in the valley. “Then we could have fled this country where there is no place for us.” During his adolescence, many young men in Ghardaïa were being drawn to Salafism, and Belmokhtar became one of its most zealous devotees. Stirred in secondary school by the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he listened ardently to cassettes and read the sermons of a Palestinian idealogue, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a mentor of Osama bin Laden and cofounder of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

  Azzam died in a car bomb explosion in Peshawar in 1989, a decisive event in young Belmokhtar’s life. One year later, Belmokhtar traveled to Mecca for the umrah, a secondary pilgrimage typically carried out during Ramadan. The following year, he and three other teenagers from Ghardaïa made their way to Afghanistan to join the jihad. They were motivated, in part, by a desire to avenge Azzam’s murder, though it was never clear who the culprits had been; the suspects ranged from the Mossad, Israel’s covert operations and counterterrorism unit, to rivals within the recently formed Al Qaeda. The Soviet Union had withdrawn from Afghanistan in February 1989. Belmokhtar fell in with Hezb-i-Islami, an Islamist guerrilla group fighting to bring down a secular regime in Kabul. Comprised of thousands of international recruits, the Islamist rebels were based in the tribal areas of Pakistan and were led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a virulently anti-Western mujahideen leader to whom the Central Intelligence Agency had funneled at least $600 million to wage war against the Soviets during the 1980s.

  Later Belmokhtar found his way to an Al Qaeda camp in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan, about a hundred miles from Kabul, and there forged connections with radical Islamists from across the Middle East. They included Abu Qatada, a Bethlehem-born jihadi who would later become known as “Osama bin Laden’s Ambassador man in Europe” and who called for attacks on American citizens “wherever they are.” Another acquaintance was Abu Mohammed Al Maqdisi, a Nablus-born idealogue who would become the spiritual mentor to the murderous commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi—whom Belmokhtar also claimed to have met, briefly, in Jalalabad.

  Belmokhtar lost his left eye when explosives he was handling during a training exercise blew up in his face, according to an interview he gave to a jihadi website years later. In late 1992—just before the government of Pakistan, under international pressure for harboring potential terrorists, expelled many foreign mujahideen, or holy warriors—Belmokhtar returned to Algeria. Earlier that year the Algerian military had nullified the election victory of a popular Islamist party called the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), and plunged the country into one of the bloodiest civil wars of the twentieth century. Belmokhtar, whose Islamist views had been hardened by his years in Afghanistan, joined the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA), a brutal militia fighting to overthrow a newly established military regime and replace it with an Islamist state.

  By the mid-1990s, according to a 2004 human rights report by the Justice Commission for Algeria, the GIA was engaging in horrific killings of civilians suspected of collaboration with Algerian security forces, or simply for behavior deemed un-Islamic. “The GIA attacked families, young people and imposed taboos,” recalled one survivor near Algiers. “Every other day we discovered bodies, including of young girls. They were sometimes hung to a post or tied up with metal wires, sliced to pieces or beheaded. There seemed to be no limit to horror.” The GIA set up roadbocks, stopped buses, searched for “suspects”—including anyone who had done military service—and executed them on the spot. Soon the GIA gravitated from shootings to bombings of buses, markets, trains, schools, administration buildings, and factories. Large-scale civilian massacres, carried out by both Islamic extremists and the Algerian army, swept the country. “The sound of gunfire and bomb explosions, the screams of the victims, and the flames and smoke of the houses on fire are audible and visibl
e from a distance,” an Amnesty International report noted at the end of 1997, at the height of the killings.

  The civil war began to wind down in 1999. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika pardoned both Islamist fighters and government torturers and execution squads. By then, the army and the Islamist rebels had killed 100,000 civilians. “The weaker brethren of the Islamist revolt went home while the hard, unforgiving men emigrated into the deserts and across the Algerian border,” wrote the journalist Robert Fisk in The Independent. A new phase of the jihad was taking shape—one that would target French and American citizens in North Africa, draw fighters from across the Islamic world, seize swaths of lightly patrolled territory, and lay the groundwork for a caliphate in the Sahara. “Belmokhtar inherited a ‘cleansed’ Al Qa’ida qatiba [brigade]—and a new version of Bin Laden’s battle,” Fisk wrote.

  Belmokhtar had always been a reluctant participant in some of the GIA’s more cold-blooded crimes. Though he killed Algerian soldiers and customs officers with cool efficiency—the Algerian government sentenced him to death twice in absentia for these murders—he had also argued that murdering noncombatants tarnished the jihadis’ image and cost them popular support. Around 1998, while the GIA was still carrying out near-daily massacres in the suburbs of Algiers, Belmokhtar quit the group and retreated to Tamanrasset, an oasis town in the Ahaggar Mountains north of the Mali-Algeria border, and the principal city of the Algerian Tuareg tribe.

  Here, Belmokhtar moved from Islamic jihad to self-enrichment. Ingratiating himself with elders in Arab and Tuareg villages on both sides of the border—the two ethnic groups maintained an uneasy coexistence in the Sahara—the former mujahid spread around cash and livestock, took four Tuareg and Arab brides, including pubescent girls, established deep roots in the communities, and became the dominant player in the smuggling of tobacco across West and North Africa. Belmokhtar traded in both counterfeits produced in China and Vietnam and genuine Western brands, which typically entered West Africa from the United States and Europe through Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Guinea, and reached Mali by road or by boat along the Niger. Belmokhtar and his colleagues charged a tax for safe passage of the cigarettes or smuggled the product themselves through the Sahara along established salt-trading routes by SUVs, trucks, and motorcycles. The final destinations were Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, which together consume nearly half of Africa’s cigarettes, much of them purchased on the black market.