The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  Adding to the frustration and sense of drift, the U.S. government was locked into an acrimonious debate about how best to train the Malian troops. Vicki Huddleston was now working out of the Pentagon as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa, overseeing the counterterrorism campaign against the jihadis in the Sahara. Initially opposing Wald when she had been ambassador, Huddleston had shifted her position radically as terrorism grew in the region. She now believed that the objective of the U.S. training mission should be nothing less than the “termination of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” She urged the new ambassador to Mali, Gillian Milovanovic, who arrived in the country in the fall of 2008 and who had significant say over how the training program should be run, to create a quick reaction force of elite Malian troops to destroy nests of Al Qaeda militants.

  Milovanovic thought that Huddleston’s goal was “ludicrous,” she would say half a decade later. It would take years to build Malian SWAT teams from scratch, she argued with Huddleston in meetings at the Pentagon. Even the army’s most elite units, known as ETIAs, were in sorry shape. Milovanovic noted in a confidential cable that a U.S. Army captain had introduced her to “one, rather unimpressive soldier, an older, rail thin man with a scraggly beard and bloodshot eyes who had been lounging against a motorbike in a dirty T-shirt inside a warehouse. [The captain] explained that in spite of appearances, this was one of ETIA’s best men, noting that he had been one of the survivors of a July 4 ambush of a Malian Army patrol by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”

  Milovanovic argued that the army should establish a presence only on well-traveled desert roads and limit itself to hunting down Al Qaeda’s weapons and fuel caches. “We won’t train the guys to look for Al Qaeda in little Toyota trucks and get ambushed,” she said. Huddleston believed it was a tepid approach that was guaranteed to fail.

  But in Milovanovic’s view, the Pentagon brass was unwilling to put its money where its mouth was. Six months after arriving in Bamako, Milovanovic flew to Washington to attend her first meetings at the Pentagon, and was “stunned,” she recounted, by the discrepancy between the amount of money the Defense Department claimed to be spending on Mali and what she had seen in the field. “It was a huge canard,” she said. Tens of millions of dollars went to cover the transport and housing of U.S. trainers, but were misleadingly counted on the balance sheet as direct aid to the Malian military. Equipment was constantly promised but rarely delivered.

  Huddleston shot down a proposal by Milovanovic and her defense attaché to provide the poorly equipped Malian air force with a pair of Cessna Caravans—durable turboprops that can be used to transport troops, bomb enemy positions, and conduct aerial surveillance. Huddleston believed that the Malian air force would allow the airplanes to fall apart or use them to attack Tuareg separatists—“their own people”—instead of their intended targets, the jihadis. That left the air force with a couple of Soviet-era MiG-21 fighter jets that hadn’t been off the ground in years, two 1960s Navy Cessnas that barely stayed in the air on the cannibalized parts of a third plane, and four eight-seat Mi-24 helicopter gunships, or Hinds, that had been grounded after a Ukrainian pilot was shot dead in action against Tuareg rebels.

  Between 2008 and 2010, a period of alarming growth for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Malian armed forces received from the United States a single shipment of military hardware: thirty armored trucks. The trucks lacked communications gear, and months went by before the Pentagon bothered to send technicians to install the equipment. The radios rapidly drained the truck batteries, making them useless for long-range desert deployments. The trainers finally placed tags on the dashboards in Bambara, the main language of southern Mali, and French.

  “Don’t turn the radio on,” they read.

  By contrast, the French government, which had once shrugged off the jihadis’ growing presence in the Sahel, had, by late 2009, became far more aggressive against them. AQIM had ambushed and murdered four French tourists, including three members of the same family, during a roadside picnic in Mauritania in December 2007—prompting the cancellation the next year of the annual Paris–Dakar motor rally. The group injured a Frenchwoman in a gun attack on the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott, in February 2008, and killed a French engineer, along with eleven Algerian civilians, in the explosion of two booby-trapped cars in Lakhdaria, Algeria, that June. In August 2009, Abdelmalek Droukdel, the Algeria-based leader of the group, denounced France as the “mother of all evils”; days later, an AQIM terrorist detonated a suicide bomb in front of the French embassy in Nouakchott, killing himself and injuring three passersby, including two embassy staffers. “The French realized AQIM was a growing danger,” Vicki Huddleston told me. “They considered it the biggest foreign terrorist threat that France faced.”

  Having lost all confidence in the abilities of the Malian army, France shifted its focus to conducting joint counterterrorism operations with the better-trained Mauritanian military. On July 22, 2010, French and Mauritanian Special Forces flew out of Nouakchott, crossed 1,100 miles of desert, and attacked an AQIM camp in Tigharghar, in Mali’s Adrar des Ifoghas massif, north of Kidal, where, French intelligence indicated, the septugenarian aid worker Michel Germaneau was being held prisoner. The commandos killed six Al Qaeda militants but failed to rescue Germaneau, who may have been moved from the camp just a few hours before the raid. In retaliation, Abou Zeid ordered his beheading—and may have carried it out himself. “As a quick response to the despicable French act, we confirm that we have killed hostage Germaneau in revenge for our six brothers who were killed in the treacherous operation,” Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s leader in Algeria said in a message broadcast on Al Jazeera television. “Sarkozy has [not only] failed to free his compatriot in this failed operation, but he opened the doors of hell for himself and his people.” The Barack Obama administration, unhappy about a military coup that had unseated the elected Mauritanian government two years earlier, was lukewarm about the joint operation. “So by 2010 the United States and France had reversed their roles,” recalled Huddleston. “The French were being far more proactive in their pursuit of Al Qaeda.”

  U.S. officials believed that Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Touré, remained oblivious to both the jihadis’ growing strength and his own army’s rot. After Malians voted him back to the presidency in 2002, corruption in the military ranks had deepened. Senior officers rose in rank because of connections rather than merit. Military commanders in the north were suspected of colluding with Al Qaeda in the drug trade. ATT, as he was known, often seemed to pretend that the radical Islamists didn’t exist. The jihadis didn’t pursue the Malian army—as long as they were left alone to smuggle cocaine and kidnap the occasional Westerner. “The [government’s] attitude was, ‘it was best not to poke the hornet’s nest,’ ” Defense Attaché Marshall Mantiply told me. “Why send the troops out on suicide missions?”

  Ambassador Gillian Milovanovic met Touré two times in June 2009 at the presidential palace, a sprawling whitewashed villa perched atop an extinct volcano. Her exasperation mounting, Milovanovic warned him that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s use of northern Mali as a safe haven and the killing of the British hostage Edwin Dyer were “rapidly tarnishing” the country’s image. “Do something,” she urged him. Touré made Milovanovic a firm promise to go after Al Qaeda—as long as the United States delivered more military equipment and logistical support. Milovanovic left the meeting feeling that Touré had at last seemed to understand the danger facing his country, she cabled Washington, but others expressed their doubts. “The level of inaction at the presidency was akin to firefighters deciding to sleep through alarm bells at the firehouse,” one high-ranking Malian official reported to the U.S. embassy.

  As AQIM continued to gain strength in northern Mali, Iyad Ag Ghali was, as U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats had feared, making a turn toward jihad. After serving as a hostage negotiator, diplomat without portfolio, and presidential security adviser, Gha
li had tilted back toward violence in 2006, when he had briefly joined forces with a perennial Tuareg troublemaker in Kidal, who was angry about being passed over for a military promotion. The pair had raised a rebel force, driven out government troops, and captured Kidal. Then Ghali crossed back to the government side and helped the president obtain the release of dozens of Malian soldiers held by the rebels.

  Then, in late 2008 Ghali unexpectedly announced that he was leaving Mali. He had had enough of politics and Tuareg rebellion, he told friends, rivals, and Western diplomats, and had decided to accept a low-level diplomatic posting in the Malian consulate in Jeddah, the largest port on the Red Sea, and the second largest city in Saudi Arabia after the capital, Riyadh. “I want to be near the Great Mosque of Mecca, where I can pray five times a day,” he explained to the music impresario Manny Ansar, who worried that the assignment in Saudi Arabia might push Ghali over the edge.

  Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University, the fundamentalists’ nerve center, has been an incubator for some of the most virulent strains of Wahhabism. Osama bin Laden studied business administration there and received religious instruction from Mohammed Qatub, the brother of the Islamist revivalist Sayud Qatub, who established the ideological underpinnings of violent jihad against the West. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the Palestinian Sunni theologian whose sermons on cassette had enthralled the aspiring young jihadi Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was a lecturer there before he recruited committed young Islamists to fight a holy war in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, and founded Al Qaeda with bin Laden. Ghali escaped the drudgery of his sweltering office on a back street in Jeddah to seek out Wahhabi radicals, possibly at the university and at some of the city’s 1,300 mosques. Saudi intelligence kept a close eye on him. In August 2009, a Saudi militant with links to Al Qaeda blew himself up at a gathering at the Jeddah home of Prince Mohammed bin Naif, the deputy interior minister and a leading antiterrorism figure. After the failed assassination attempt, counterterrorism forces intensified a crackdown on those suspected of links to Al Qaeda. It was around this time that the Saudi government declared Ghali persona non grata and expelled him. “I don’t think he was flipped there,” one close associate told The Atlantic Monthly four years later. “I think he’d already begun to change. But the fact that he was pushed out . . . shows that his personal beliefs had begun to match up in a very tangible way with extremist ideology and behavior.”

  When Ghali returned to Bamako from Saudi Arabia in late 2009, he began frequenting Bamako’s Green Mosque, a Salafi gathering place, where he preached the virtues of Shariah law to a large and enthusiastic following. On a Friday morning in 2009, he invited his friend Ansar to meet him there following afternoon prayers. In front of the mosque, as Wahhabis in long beards and robes walked past, Ghali again tried to coax him into the fundamentalist fold.

  “Are you sure you’re not heading down the road of violence?” Ansar asked him.

  Ghali shook his head emphatically. “We are pacifists,” he said.

  Ansar saw Ghali a final time in February 2010. He was driving north from Bamako to the Festival on the Niger, an annual four-day concert, founded in 2005 as a southern Malian counterpart to the Festival in the Desert, and held on a barge moored off the riverbank in Ségou, 140 miles north of the capital. Ghali’s distinctive, bright orange four-wheel-drive overtook his car on the two-lane road and disappeared around a curve. Minutes later, Ansar spotted the vehicle at a gas station and parked beside it. Although his relationship with Ghali had grown distant in recent years, Ansar felt a keen desire to see his old friend. In high spirits about the music festival, Ansar recalled fondly the intimate jam sessions that he and Ghali had attended with a few friends on his rooftop and by the Niger River in the mid-1990s, before Tinariwen had achieved international acclaim, and before Ghali had fallen in with the Salafis.

  Ansar remembered vividly the chain-smoking, music-loving, club-hopping bon vivant that Ghali had been in those days; the poet and lyricist who had written romantic ballads as well as martial songs for his friend, the singer-guitarist Ibrahim Ag Habib; and the hedonist who never prayed and hated being woken before noon. After parking his car, Ansar walked into the service station’s adjoining restaurant. Ghali was seated at a table in the corner with his wife, with whom Ansar had once also been on friendly terms. Wearing a hijab, she kept her eyes fixed on the table, refusing to look at him. Ghali wore a white skullcap and a white boubou over black pants. He looked austere, yet still filled up the room with his presence. He greeted Ansar with a curt hello.

  “You are going where?” he asked.

  “I’m heading for the festival in Ségou,” Ansar replied.

  Ghali’s face sagged. He looked at Ansar with what seemed to be a mixture of pity and contempt. “In his mind, I was an old friend whom he had once loved, and whom he hadn’t been able to save from the grip of Satan,” Ansar recalled. All common ground between them, it was instantly clear, had been lost. After an excruciating silence that seemed to drag out for minutes, Ansar mumbled goodbye and walked out of the restaurant.

  9

  In 2011 the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in Timbuktu was fast becoming one of the world’s most innovative manuscript conservation centers and a symbol of Timbuktu’s cultural renaissance. Abdel Kader Haidara had taken on twelve employees. A grant in 2007 from Dubai’s Juma Al Majid Center for Culture and Heritage had allowed him to build a laboratory for the repair and digitization of his manuscripts, and to create an annex with four gleaming exhibition rooms and a conference center. Haidara showed off to a visiting European reporter his new lab and his state-of-the-art photographic equipment; he used a digital camera rather than scanner, he explained, because the ultraviolet scanning technology could ignite the linen-based paper and the ferrous inks and destroy the manuscripts.

  In his workshop, Haidara had begun manufacturing acid-free paper for restoring the manuscripts to mint condition—previously imported at a high cost—and he talked with the reporter about establishing a side business selling it to tourists and exporting it. A digitization seminar was taking place on the top floor of the library, its heterogeneous participants—“Arabs with short beards, Tuaregs with turbans and reading glasses, African faces,” the reporter observed—reflecting Timbuktu’s historic role as a melting pot of ethnic groups. Haidara was making plans to release a CD containing translations of an Arabic text about conflict resolution—“The Westerners come over here and try and tell us they invented it all,” he told his visitor—while awaiting the arrival of a team of South Africans from University of Cape Town for a manuscript conservation symposium.

  Haidara was becoming an international man of letters. After the success of his first trip to the United States in 2003, for the inaugural American exhibition of African manuscripts, held at the Library of Congress, Haidara had been much sought after by libraries and museums around the world. He traveled frequently to New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, and other capitals, receiving honors, serving on academic panels, and acting as the master of ceremonies at traveling exhibitions of the Mamma Haidara Library’s manuscripts. He acquired a network of friends and colleagues abroad, became confident navigating his way through European and American cities—though he never mastered English—and found his world opening up in ways that he couldn’t have dreamed a decade earlier. He developed a familiarity with Western customs—though when he traveled in the West, he always dressed, as he did at home, in the traditional Malian robe, the boubou—learned about American and European religion, literature, music, and cuisine, and more practically, exchanged knowledge with Western counterparts about manuscript valuations and conservation techniques. At the same time, he would recall years later, “I tried to remain as modest as I could, as I had always been in Timbuktu.” He maintained the same friends in Timbuktu as he always had—boyhood playmates, associates from the world of manuscripts, along with the city’s intellectuals and imams.

  As Haidara�
�s international and domestic profile rose, friends and elders pressed him to play a more active role in Timbuktu’s society by running for local office, becoming a government functionary, even joining the High Council of Islam, an Islamic civil society organization that spanned ideologies from Sufism to Wahhabism and provided social services and charity across the country. But Haidara always refused. He believed that participation in public life invited trouble, and that the role would compromise his dedication to the city’s libraries.

  Like most of Timbuktu’s population, Haidara visited the shrines to the city’s Sufi saints occasionally, and he participated with enthusiasm every January in the Mawloud festival, a week-long celebration of the birthday of the Prophet that centered around the public reading of the city’s most cherished manuscripts, including both Korans and secular volumes. From time to time he consulted books about Islamic jurisprudence, the fikh, in his own collection when confronted with thorny problems in his marriage and his work. But religion did not play a major role in his life. What drove him most was a belief in the power of the written word—the rich variety of human experience and ideas contained between the covers of a book.

  Haidara was not a wealthy man, but the Ahmed Baba Institute had generously remunerated him for fifteen years—he had earned substantial bonuses during his forays through the Malian bush—and he had accumulated enough money to expand his passion for manuscript collecting far beyond the borders of Mali. On one trip to New York City, while browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Manhattan, he came across an eighteenth-century volume of history from the Ottoman Empire, written in gilded Arabic letters and filled with maps and designs; the bookseller wanted $1,500 but Haidara, the expert negotiator, offered $800 and walked away with it for $1,000. The Ottoman history became one of the most valued volumes in his collection.