The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  Belmokhtar was, by all accounts, a cunning, energetic, and resourceful gangster. Within a couple of years, by building an entrenched network of support through the desert, and intimidating would-be competitors, he gained so great a share of the trans-Saharan contraband business that he became known in the region as “Mr. Marlboro.” (Others called him “One Eye.”) His success moving cigarettes illegally across borders caught the attention of a breakaway Islamist movement in Algeria, the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which had split from the GIA in the waning days of the civil conflict and declared war against Algeria’s secular regime. The group’s leaders, hidden in the mountains, recruited Belmokhtar in 1998 and named him “emir” of its southwest Saharan zone. His main responsibility was smuggling weapons and ammunition to GSPC cadres. In 2002, Algeria’s intelligence service claimed to have evidence that the group was seeking ties to international terror networks, and that it had the official sanction of Osama bin Laden.

  Other violent figures, who would eventually join Belmokhtar in forming the leadership of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, were showing up on the Americans’ radar screen. One was Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, born in December 1965 to a penniless family of Bedouins in a tented camp outside Zaouia El-Abidia, an oasis town with a single paved street in the Algerian Sahara. As a boy, Abou Zeid (born Abed Hamamou) had known only poverty, desperation, and ridicule. His father, an itinerant laborer, moved the family to Bougaa, set on a windswept four-thousand-foot-high plateau in the northeast corner of the country, 190 miles east of Algiers, where he found work on a farm. Later the family picked up stakes again and settled in Sétif, another high-altitude town, infamous for the slaughter of 104 pieds-noirs—European settlers in Algeria—by Algerian freedom fighters at the end of World War II, and the subsequent massacre of thousands of civilians by French colonial forces in retaliation. In this landscape of snow-covered plains and frigid winters, he was mercilessly teased at school because of his dark skin, his short stature, and a case of rickets—a deficiency of vitamin D that weakens the bone structure and causes stooped posture and bowleggedness. He dropped out of secondary school, and shortly after that, his father, again chasing work, moved the family back south to Zaouia El-Abidia, where many of the 22,000 inhabitants scratched out a living cultivating date palm trees.

  The boy and his family lived in a modest house of dried mud brick on a sandy alley in the poorest quarter of the town, with an inscription on the iron front door that read, “Dar Es Salaam,” or “House of Peace” in Arabic. “It was Abed who painted that by his own hand,” his mother recalled to a visiting journalist years later. The teenager worked on a farm, then became a mason—a job that provided him with a nickname, “Mouallem,” or “Teacher,” because knowing the craft of masonry was considered a form of scholarship in that corner of Algeria.

  He swiftly moved from construction to contraband. In the early 1980s Abou Zeid tapped into Saharan smuggling networks and brought bulk quantities of tea, electronics, and cigarettes from Libya across the poorly patrolled border into Algeria, selling them on the black market in Zaouia El-Abidia. But Abou Zeid was no Belmokhtar. Arrested for the first time for smuggling by the Algerian gendarmerie in 1984, he shuttled in and out of jail cells during his twenties, where the mistreatment and bullying he had suffered as a teenager continued. “He was manhandled [by the police] many times,” a member of the Algerian police told a Paris Match reporter for a 2010 profile. Mohamed Mokeddem, the director of the Algiers newspaper Ennahar and an expert on Sahel Terrorism, declared that “His hatred of the Algerian government became deeply anchored in his personality.”

  Filled with resentments, destabilized by the death of his father in 1989, Abou Zeid drifted toward radical Islam. “Before [his father died] he had always been very open, he liked to laugh,” said a close friend from Zaouia El-Abidia, where the Bedouin population is well known for their festivals and fondness for drinking palm wine, despite its interdiction by the Koran. Abou Zeid attended clandestine meetings of the Algerian Muslim Brotherhood in Zaouia El-Abidia, smuggling weapons from Libya to Islamist groups, and preparing, say security officials and journalists, for a coming jihad against the Algerian regime. At the beginning of the 1990s, he purchased a small date palm farm just outside the city. “He asked me to prepare semolina for forty people, saying that they were workers at his farm,” his mother remembered. “In fact they were Islamists, but I could not refuse them.”

  In 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front seemed on the verge of a landslide victory in Algeria’s legislative elections, prompting the military to annul the second round of voting. Abou Zeid at the time was a member of the Islamic party’s bureau in Touggourt, a large town not far from Zaouia El-Abidia, and he, like many of his comrades in the organization, vowed to take revenge.

  Some time afterward, the Algerian army ambushed an armed group of Islamists outside Zaouia El-Abidia, and killed Abou Zeid’s beloved older brother, Bachir. Immediately after the killing, he joined the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, the most violent terrorist band fighting the state, and may have participated in a series of massacres of civilians accused of being collaborators with the Algerian military. In 1998, he joined the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat. Abou Zeid was an ordinary foot soldier, under the command of Amari Saifi, a former Algerian army paratrooper and ex-bodyguard of the Algerian defense minister. The terrorist leader, who went by the nom de guerre El Para, had little respect for his diminutive and frail young charge. “He is ugly and even shorter than [French president Nicolas] Sarkozy,” said El Para in the early 2000s. “I think that he has an [inferiority] complex, and that he’s even a little jealous of me.” But Abou Zeid climbed through the hierarchy and was soon granted rare permission to live with a woman—a sign of his importance within the organization. In 2002, he issued his first fatwa, declaring all young Algerians who completed their compulsory military service to be legitimate targets of GSPC attacks. Abou Zeid would soon earn a reputation as one of the GSPC’s most rabid idealogues—and perhaps its most merciless killer.

  In 2003, the paratrooper-turned-jihadi El Para enlisted Abou Zeid in a scheme that would gain notoriety as one of the most audacious criminal operations in the history of the Sahara. Between late February and April, he and his Islamist militia kidnapped thirty-two Western tourists—French, German, Swiss, and Dutch—from a stretch of scenic desert road in southeast Algeria. The terrorists picked off four or five foreigners at a time as they rode motorcycles or four-wheel-drives down the highway—known as “the Graveyard Piste” because of the ancient Tuareg cemeteries that lie along the route—and disappeared with them into the wilderness.

  At first El Para, Abou Zeid, and their gang did not announce their crime: a German military reconnaissance plane captured pictures of abandoned vehicles on the desert floor, and other imagery indicating that the tourists had been abducted, divided into two groups, and marched into the desert. One thousand two hundred Algerian soldiers and police joined German counterterrorism forces on a search by camel and helicopter through mountains and canyons. Not long afterward, a letter discovered by a scout under a tree revealed that the GSPC had been behind the abductions.

  In May 2003, Algerian Special Forces raided a canyon, killed fifteen kidnappers, and carried seventeen hostages to safety. El Para, whom the French news media would come to call “the bin Laden of the Sahara,” and Abou Zeid escaped the carnage and took the remaining fifteen hostages, fourteen Germans and one Dutchman, on a two-week-long trek south into Mali. The captors forced their female hostages to wear hijabs—Islamic veils—improvised out of handkerchiefs and towels and fed the captives little but porridge mixed in a pail with muddy water. One forty-six-year-old German woman died of heat stroke during the flight through the desert and was buried in the sand. The bedraggled group took refuge in Mali’s Adrar des Ifoghas massif, a wilderness of eroded sandstone and granite hills, ancient riverbeds filled with sand, and boulder-strewn valleys that begins forty miles north of the
provincial capital of Kidal. In an early example of what would become regular practice for the region’s jihadis, El Para and his men, including Abou Zeid, sent word to the Malian and German governments that they would free their hostages in exchange for a multimillion-dollar ransom.

  The man whom Mali’s president designated as the government’s representative in the hostage negotiations was Iyad Ag Ghali, a prominent Malian Tuareg from Kidal. Like all Tuaregs, Ghali came out of a culture of Sufism—the moderate, mystical form of Islam that had long dominated northern Mali. He was also a skilled fighter, a natural leader, a poet, a songwriter, a spiritual searcher, and a killer. As dangerous as these jihadis were, Ghali would emerge, ironically, as the biggest threat of all to the region’s stability.

  His first exposure to violence had come early. Born around 1957 in a nomadic encampment north of Kidal, Ghali was the son of a Tuareg soldier who had sided with the Malian government during a failed 1963 rebellion, when Tuareg secessionists rose up against newly independent Mali to try to establish their own state—Azawad, meaning “the land of pastures.” When Iyad Ag Ghali was about six years old, a rebel commander shot his father in the head and killed him. Ten years later, after a devastating drought struck the north and killed nearly every camel, sheep, and cow in the region, the teenage Ghali fled the country, hitchhiked and walked across the desert for weeks, and ended up in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. He survived, like thousands of other Tuareg exiles, known as ishumar (from the French word chômeur, or unemployed), by doing odd jobs—gardening, carpentry, housepainting, and herding cattle, goats, and sheep.

  After a couple of years of this hardscrabble existence, Ghali founded a small Tuareg rebel movement in Tripoli—it consisted of a one-room office, a fax machine, and about thirty members—and began laying plans for a new Tuareg insurgency. Though rebels had killed his own father, Ghali had witnessed the brutality of the Malian military government while growing up in Kidal—the governor carried out summary executions of suspected dissidents in the town square—and his associations with young Tuareg exiles in the cafés of Tamanrasset and Tripoli had heightened his sympathies for the rebel cause. In his early twenties, he underwent training at a military camp in the Libyan Sahara established in the early 1980s by Qaddafi, ostensibly to prepare the Tuareg exiles for another uprising, but primarily to train disposable young fighters for Libya’s military adventures in Africa and the Middle East. Ghali fought in Qaddafi’s Islamic Brigade alongside the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 1982, hunkering down for weeks in bunkers near Sidon as Israeli warplanes bombarded PLO targets. He also joined in a 1987 infantry and tank assault in the Chadian desert against the forces of the dictator Hassan Habré, whom Qaddafi was seeking to depose. The Chadian army surrounded and killed thousands of Qaddafi’s troops, forcing Ghali’s Tuareg unit to flee across the border.

  Ghali fell in with a group of Tuareg fighter-musicians in a barracks at Qaddafi’s camp called the Artists’ House. It turned out that he had a flair for poetry, and he soon began writing lyrics for them. The music, similar to that of the great guitarist Ali Farka Touré and also known as “the desert blues,” often consisted of nothing more than two or three chords, call-and-response vocals, a melancholy tone, and a single repetitive, hypnotic phrase. Ghali’s song “Bismillahi,” or “In the Name of God,” would become the unofficial anthem of Azawad, the independent state that many Tuaregs wanted to carve out of northern Mali, stretching from the Niger River north to the Taghaza salt mines, and northeast of Timbuktu to the modern-day border with Mauritania. “In the name of God, we rise up and begin/The revolution in the company of all our brothers,” the first verse proclaimed. “Like true warriors we are going to trample on the enemy/Yes, in the name of God, we rise up and begin.” In his ballad “Pendant Toute Une Nuit,” or “All Night Long,” Ghali declared his rapturous love for an unnamed woman: “My eyes are still lost in the stars/Crushed by a nostalgia that envelops me like a tent/I’m invaded by memories of your soft words/As if you were speaking now beside me.”

  In June 1990 Ghali led about one hundred men, armed with ten aging AK-47 rifles, across the Malian border. They attacked remote military camps, surprised the poorly trained Malian troops, achieved several quick victories, captured arms and vehicles, and drew hundreds, then thousands of Tuaregs to their cause. “Tuaregs didn’t go to school, weren’t in the army, and didn’t have any positions in the government,” one rebel commander who fought alongside Ghali explained to me. “We had to return to fight a war so we would be accepted as Malian citizens and have equal rights.”

  Experienced in close combat with light weaponry after years of fighting in Qaddafi’s Islamic Brigade, the rebels picked off the government troops with lethal accuracy. They captured the imaginations of many in the West. The French historian Pierre Boilley described the “eternal Saharan mystique” of “a veiled nomad perched on his camel and brandishing his AK-47. . . . These men no longer carried the sword at their side like their fathers but instead waved the ‘Kalach’ . . . the arm of all resistance movements, of dissidence and revolt.”

  Each evening the rebels gathered around campfires and listened to warrior-musicians play guitar and sing martial songs written by Ghali and other commanders. The rebel-musicians’ bootleg cassettes were passed around the north, glorifying their combat and drawing more young men into the insurgency.

  The rebellion ended with a temporary peace accord in January 1991, and Ghali arrived to a hero’s welcome in Bamako. Mali’s government conceded much of what Ghali and his rebels had asked for—millions of dollars in development money, integration of the fighters into the army and civil service. “He was Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Che Guevara rolled into one,” said Mohammed “Manny” Ansar (the family name means “defenders”), a Tuareg law school graduate from the dunes north of Timbuktu, who first met Ghali in Bamako at the time of the signing ceremony and organized a dinner for him with Tuareg business and student leaders. As a reward for his persuading many Tuaregs to renounce violence, the regime made Ghali a presidential security adviser, and gave him a villa in Bamako and salary to keep the peace. But Ghali never renounced the goal of Tuareg independence, maintained close ties to the rebels, and kept his options open.

  At this time Bamako was emerging as a world music capital, and Ghali’s musical connoisseurship continued to develop. Every Sunday he and Manny Ansar—then a development official for a Norwegian charity and aspiring music producer—organized outdoor concerts at a picnic site in the shade of a mango tree by the Niger, just outside Bamako. The concerts featured a small group of Tuareg musicians with whom Ghali had fought in the battlefields of the north, led by a Carlos Santana lookalike named Ibrahim Ag Habib. Habib and his fellow ex-rebels transfixed their growing audiences with songs about heroic assaults on desert strongholds, the power of companionship in the Sahara, and their yearning for a homeland.

  Ibrahim Ag Habib, who cited influences ranging from Egyptian pop to Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, called his band “Kel Tinariwen”—“People of the Desert”—which he soon shortened to Tinariwen. In January 2000 Ghali invited Habib and the other Tuareg musicians to perform at a Tuareg folklore festival in the desert north of Kidal. Two thousand nomads gathered in a valley of red sand between mountains and dunes for three days of camel races and indigenous music, much of it filmed for national television. No foreign tourists attended this nomadic gathering, but the event, Ansar would later say, would serve as his inspiration for the three-day concert series that he would call the Festival in the Desert. Ansar and a few fellow Tuareg promoters inaugurated the festival in 2001 with live music and camel racing in the dunes north of Kidal. Iyad Ag Ghali provided security for the event. Two years later, Ansar gained total control of the festival and moved it to Essakane, a traditional meeting place for members of his clan, near Timbuktu, where—thanks to his shrewd marketing and the appearances of famous Western musicians—it began attracting a significant number o
f visitors from around the world.

  But even as he became an aficionado and a promoter of Malian music, Ghali was being drawn into Islamic fundamentalism. During the winter of 2002, four missionaries from the Tablighi Jama’at movement, based in Pakistan, arrived in Kidal and began preaching to the Tuaregs. Founded in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the early twentieth century, Tablighi Jama’at is ostensibly a peaceful sect whose adherents emulate the austere lifestyle of the Prophet Mohammed—sleeping on rough mats on the floor, using twigs to brush their teeth—and spend forty days a year overseas on door-to-door prosletyzing missions. “The Pakistanis are up there converting all the former Tuareg rebels,” Ansar was told by a friend living in northeast Mali. “They’re all becoming devout.” Even Ghali, Ansar learned to his surprise, had begun attending mosque on a regular basis and had expressed keen interest in what these strict Muslims had to say.