Huddleston took a road trip through the north of Mali in late 2003, trying to assess support for the radicals among Tuareg and Arab clans. She was alarmed by what she found. The embassy had been distributing money—about half a million dollars since she got there—on modest projects in the desert, building wells and other light infrastructure with the hope of winning over the local population. She traveled by four-wheel-drive with her security team through Belmokhtar’s territory, north of Timbuktu, and arrived after a day’s drive through the arid bush in an Arab village where he had taken a twelve-year-old bride. The mayor and other notables put on a reception for Huddleston. Huddleston thought, “Belmokhtar is probably in the crowd watching me.” The place, she felt, was “full of tension. It was a powder keg.” Later Huddleston traveled three hundred miles across the Sahara to Kidal, the remote Tuareg outpost in the northeast corner of the country, in the shadow of the Adrar des Ifoghas massif, where she paid a call on Iyad Ag Ghali. She found the Tuareg leader in a government building in the center of Kidal, a dun-brown backwater of twenty thousand people, where herders drove packs of camels through the wide sand-swept streets, and a Malian flag fluttered from atop a turreted French-colonial-era fort perched on a pile of rocks. Ghali was serving as the president’s security adviser as well as the unofficial leader of his Tuareg clan. He was “a good-looking guy with a turban, a nice beard, and piercing eyes,” she remembered. “He looked the part of a desert warrior.” For half an hour they talked about U.S. assistance programs in the Kidal region, and about the importance of keeping a lid on restive Tuaregs.
“We don’t need the resurgence of the rebellion,” she told Ghali.
“Of course not,” he agreed.
Ghali’s deepening Islamic devotion also worried Huddleston. Although the Tablighi Jama’at sect presents itself as a peaceful group, it had sometimes served as a stepping-stone to jihad. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be charged in the United States in the September 11 attacks, was a Tablighi Jama’at follower in France, as was Hervé Djamel Loiseau, who had died during the 2001 U.S. bombardment of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” captured by U.S. forces after the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi, near Mazar-e-Sharif, had joined the Afghan radicals after a flirtation with Tablighi Jama’at. And at the very moment that Huddleston was meeting with Ghali, two young Tablighi Jama’at followers from Great Britain were heading down a path toward terrible violence. The two men would soon attend a terrorist camp in Pakistan, then return to the United Kingdom to plan and execute the July 7, 2005 suicide attacks on the London Underground and on a double-decker bus, in which fifty-two people died and more than seven hundred were injured, many maimed for life.
“You’d better not be involved in terrorism,” Huddleston cautioned Ghali.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” he replied.
8
By 2007 the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, the Islamic extremist organization that had been formed a decade earlier from the remnants of Algerian rebel groups, and that had announced itself by kidnapping dozens of European tourists in the Sahara in 2003, was evolving into one of the best financed and most lethal terrorist organizations in the world. At the end of 2004, the GSPC had acquired an ambitious new emir, Abdelmalek Droukdel, a thirty-four-year-old Algerian from the agricultural town of Meftah, fifteen miles south of Algiers, who had established his jihadi credentials as a holy warrior in Afghanistan, and who sought alliances with the most violent figures in the international jihadi network. One to whom he reached out was Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born commander of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then fighting a guerrilla war against the U.S. military in Iraq, and blowing up Iraqi Shi’ite Muslims with the objective of inciting a civil war. Droukdel tried to enlist the homicidal Al Zarqawi in a plot to kidnap French civilians and trade them for El Para, but the plan never got off the ground. When a U.S. drone killed Al Zarqawi, Droukdel vowed revenge on a jihadi website: “O infidels and apostates, your joy will be brief and you will cry for a long time . . . we are all Zarqawi.”
On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 atttacks, in 2006, bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, announced the formal merger of Al Qaeda and the GSPC. Exactly three months later, the GSPC bombed and fired on a convoy near Algiers carrying employees of Brown & Root-Condor, a joint venture of the U.S. Halliburton Group and Sonatrach, the Algerian state-owned oil company. The company was expanding military bases in southern Algeria. An Algerian driver was killed, and nine workers, including an American and four Britons, were wounded.
The Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in January 2007. AQIM declared that its primary goal was bringing down the Algerian regime and replacing it with an Islamic state, and Al Zawahiri proclaimed that the organization would also become “a bone in the throat of American and French crusaders.” Almost immediately AQIM unleashed a series of devastating attacks in the Sahel. Terrorists blew up the front of the Algerian prime minister’s house and a police headquarters in Algiers, killing twenty-three people and injuring more than 160, and car-bombed the offices of the United Nations, also in Algiers, killing sixty. Among the dead were U.N. staffers from Denmark, Senegal, and the Philippines.
The leaders of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operated from villages hidden deep in the mountains of Kabylie, a hundred miles east of Algiers, largely beyond the reach of Algeria’s security forces. Under Droukdel’s command, the group developed a tightly hierarchical structure. Two leadership committees, the fifteen-member Council of Notables, led by Droukdel, and a fourteen-member Shura Council, led by Abdu Oubeida Al Annabi, another veteran of the Afghan jihad, determined targets and priorities, established links with other terrorist groups around the world, and maintained a public presence through audio speeches, videos, and website communiqués. The great majority of these men were mujahideen who had earned their stripes with the GIA during the Algerian civil war and with the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, AQIM’s predecessor, in the early 2000s. Some had received training with Al Qaeda in Pakistan or Afghanistan; nearly all were kidnappers, drug smugglers, and murderers. These two command structures presided over six committees—political, judicial, medical, military, finance, and foreign relations—and divided their territory of operations into two zones, the “Central Emirate,” including northern Algeria and Tunisia; and the “Sahara Emirate,” including northern Mali, southern Algeria, Niger, and Libya.
Droukdel and his fellow commanders in the Kabylie identified northern Mali—with its weak security forces, vast swath of desert, and growing presence of Western tourists and development workers—as both a vital source of revenue from drug trafficking and kidnappings, and a sanctuary for its fighters. The jihadi organization subdivided northern Mali into two zones, administered by rival emirs. Abdelhamid Abou Zeid controlled the territory around Kidal. The region belonging to Mokhtar Belmokhtar lay north of Timbuktu. Each led a qatiba, or brigade, of 150 to 200 fighters. Abou Zeid had named his unit the “Tarek Ibn Ziyad Brigade,” after the Moorish general who conquered Spain in the eighth century. Belmokhtar called his brigade “Al Moulathamine,” or “The Masked Ones.”
Largely autonomous but expected to produce large sums of money for AQIM, the Al Qaeda militiamen moved through the desert in all-terrain vehicles, oriented themselves with GPS systems, and picked up food, ammunition, fuel, batteries, and even replacement vehicles from cachés buried in the sand. A home video made by a fighter of the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Brigade, captured in 2010 after a shootout with Algerian security forces, showed the men sleeping in caves, making their own clothes on manual sewing machines, repairing their own vehicles, and subsisting on water from the region’s handful of streams and an unvarying diet of roots and lizards.
Abou Zeid was an austere figure, a brutal executioner, wholly committed to Islamist ideology. “There is a commercial aspect to what he does but it is mainly about jihad,” one Western terrorism expert in Bamako told Jane’s Terrorism a
nd Security Monitor. Belmokhtar was “a businessman with radical tendencies” who operated according to his own code: he viewed soldiers, customs agents, and other government agents as fair game in his holy war, but he usually refrained from killing civilians. The two men competed bitterly for the attentions of their bosses in the Algerian mountains—but their rivalry was good for Al Qaeda’s balance sheet. It fueled a wave of abductions of Westerners for ransom that would, over the next four years, contribute as much as $116 million to AQIM’s coffers.
In April 2008 AQIM gunmen seized two Austrian tourists in Tunisia’s southeastern Sahara, the first abduction of Westerners by jihadis in the desert since 2003. Al Qaeda released those hostages after 252 days of captivity when Austria reportedly paid a $6.4 million ransom. The wave of kidnappings accelerated. In December 2008, Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s brigade intercepted a vehicle carrying two Canadian diplomats on a road outside Niamey, Niger, shoved them into a pickup truck, drove them hundreds of miles through the Sahara, and held them in a series of desolate jihadi camps. A month after that abduction, Abou Zeid’s commandos ambushed three vehicles bringing tourists to Mali from a Tuareg music-and-culture festival in Niger. The gunmen grabbed four middle-aged and elderly European hostages and carried them off to another desert encampment. That June, in a change of tactics, two Al Qaeda gunmen shot dead Christopher Leggett, a thirty-nine-year-old American English teacher, in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. Al Jazeera released a statement from AQIM’s spokesperson saying that Leggett had been executed “for his Christianizing activities.”
Soon it was back to kidnapping. In November 2009, Al Qaeda commandos attacked a convoy on the main highway through Mauritania, and seized three Spanish aid workers. Two weeks later kidnappers under Abou Zeid’s command grabbed a French aid worker from his hotel room in Ménaka, a town in eastern Mali. And days later, in a familiar modus operandi, the Islamists seized a vacationing Italian couple from their vehicle on another desolate road in Mauritania. The kidnapping, an AQIM spokesman said, was in revenge for “the crimes [of the Silvio] Berlusconi government [of Italy against] the right of Islam and Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Abou Zeid struck again in the spring of 2010, with the spectacular abductions of four French workers for Areva at a uranium plant in northern Niger, and the seizure of a seventy-eight-year-old retired French engineer, Michel Germaneau, also in northern Niger, where he was working for a charity organization.
Robert Fowler, one of the two kidnapped Canadians, who was serving as United Nations special envoy to Niger at the time of his abduction, was one of the few Westerners to get a sustained look at Mokhtar Belmokhtar. The AQIM emir appeared periodically at the desert camps where he and his colleague were being held. “He was relatively slight, with a heavily weathered and deeply lined face and curly black hair,” wrote Fowler, who had suffered a compression fracture in a vertebra as a result of his multi-day journey through the desert immediately after his abduction. Fowler described Belmokhtar as a “revered leader” who exuded a sinister magnetism. “He had thin lips set in a straight line, and his mouth twisted from time to time into a ghost of a cold, almost wry smile. His most distinguishing feature was a deep almost vertical scar that began above the middle of his right eyebrow, crossed his right eyelid, and continued across his right cheek, disappearing into his moustache.” Belmokhtar’s crew was sustained by a fanaticism that impressed Fowler. “They would sit chanting in the full Sahara sun for hour after hour,” he observed. “They seemed to have no trouble recruiting. The youngest among them was seven . . . and the voices of three of the others had yet to break. Parents, we were proudly informed, brought them their sons as ‘gifts to God.’ ”
Fowler also described one interaction that set off in sharp relief the different personalities of Belmokhtar and his jihadi rival in northern Mali: Abou Zeid. On April 21, 2009, the Canadian government paid a mere 700,000 euros, then worth about $1 million, for Fowler’s and his fellow Canadian diplomat’s release—a deal negotiated by Belmokhtar himself, to the consternation of his superiors. Fowler was driven to a rendezvous point in the desert just as Abou Zeid’s men arrived with two female Western hostages. Both had been seized after the music festival in Niger. After five months of fear, hunger, ovenlike heat, stultifying boredom, and brutal mistreatment by Abou Zeid and his men, both women suffered from dysentery, and the arm of one had swollen and turned necrotic from a scorpion bite. Their governments had sent them medicine during the negotiation process, but Abou Zeid had withheld it from them. “I recoiled with horror at the sight of those small, troubled white faces, twisted with pain,” Fowler recalled. Belmokhtar inspected the women and, with a “thunderous look on his face,” gave them dysentery pills from a medical kit. Abou Zeid’s callous reputation solidified seven months later. The British government, following a long-standing policy, refused to meet his brigade’s demands for the release of sixty-two-year-old plumbing contractor Edwin Dyer: a multimillion-dollar ransom and the release from a British prison of Abu Qatada, the radical Jordanian cleric whom Belmokhtar had known since the Afghanistan jihad of the 1980s. In June 2009, Abou Zeid beheaded the Briton. Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned Dyer’s “barbaric” murder, and avowed that “it strengthens our determination never to concede to the demands of terrorists, nor pay ransoms.”
Other European governments did not display the same resolve. Understandably unwilling to see their citizens subjected to brutal treatment and possible execution, and disregarding U.S. and British government admonitions that the ransom payments were only fueling Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s recruitment efforts and arms purchases, they turned over tens of millions of dollars to the kidnappers and pressured the Malian government as well to make painful concessions. The jihadis released one Spanish aid worker in March 2010 and her two male compatriots five months later, in exchange for a total ransom paid by the Spanish government that has been estimated as high as $12.7 million; they also freed the Italian couple north of Gao after four months, in a trade for four radical Islamists held in Malian prisons.
Belmokhtar and Abou Zeid supplemented the ransoms they received from European governments with growing profits from international drug trafficking. They had started in that business in the early 2000s, employing Tuareg and Arab couriers to carry cocaine overland through Mali from Equatorial Guinea, a narco-state on the Atlantic Coast controlled by Colombian drug traffickers. By the latter part of the decade, the drug cartels, with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb intermediaries, were shipping huge quantities of cocaine by air through the Malian Sahara. In 2009 nomads discovered the charred carcass of a Boeing 727-200 in the Sahara north of Kidal. It had offloaded as many as ten tons of cocaine, according to a United Nations intelligence report, and, while attempting to take off, had become stuck in the sand. The crew had abandoned the plane and set it on fire to cover their tracks. Recovered flight logs revealed that the plane had made repeated flights between Colombia and Mali, suggesting that a vast and lucrative drug trafficking network existed between the two countries. With their coffers full of cash, their numbers growing, and their logistical capabilities improving, the terrorist group, U.S. officials believed, would soon become capable of attacking Western embassies in the region, and exporting their terror overseas.
In 2005 the Pentagon had launched the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative, a six-year, $500-million program aimed at strengthening the armies of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, and a dozen other northern African nations. Special Forces commandos and Navy SEALs were rotated in to instruct hundreds of Malian soldiers and officers in basic military tactics, from assembling weapons to first aid, to patrolling the desert on foot and in vehicles. The Americans ran trainees through six-week courses conducted three or four times a year near bases in Mopti, Bamako, Gao, and Timbuktu. The army, the trainers recognized immediately, was in desperate shape. The soldiers’ rifles, mostly AK-47s from the former Eastern bloc and China, had broken stocks, clips, and slings. Ammunition was decades old and stored
in dampness or extreme heat. Troops showed up for weapons training without a single bullet in their clips. Flying in by helicopter to a Malian military base in the far north to observe the training in 2009, Marshall Mantiply, the U.S. defense attaché, noted the soldiers’ mismatched uniforms, cracked boots, and headgear ranging from turbans to baseball caps. The men looked “unsoldierly,” he thought. The recruitment of rank-and-file troops “was attracting the dregs of the society—all the problem children, failures in school, delinquents, and criminals,” one Malian presidential adviser acknowledged to me several years later. Most of these Malian recruits had grown up in extreme poverty, and they lacked even the most basic skills for functioning on the battlefield. Mantiply observed one war zone simulation exercise that called for soldiers to replace a military truck driver who had been “shot and killed” in an ambush. The troops refused to participate; not a single one of them, it turned out, knew how to drive.
It was not the first time that the Malian army had proven itself an untrustworthy partner in the field. During their pursuit of the Algerian terrorist leader known as El Para through the desert near Mauritania back in 2004, a U.S.-trained Malian brigade had been closing in on his hideout when El Para and his men suddenly broke camp and escaped across the border into Niger. Somebody inside the brigade, the U.S. learned, had tipped off the jihadi commander that the soldiers were getting close. At the time, General Chuck Wald, the deputy commander of the European Command, had vowed angrily that he would “never” work with the Malian armed forces again. Colonel Didier Dacko, a U.S.-trained brigade commander who would become the commander in chief of the Malian military, would admit: “Esprit de corps did not exist.”
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 10
