Their objective was Konna, the Niger River town of 35,000 people that marked the northern limit of Malian government territory. Five hundred Malian troops and a handful of trucks and armored personnel carriers formed a flimsy front line in the bush north of the town. Citizens along the two-hundred-mile route from Timbuktu had informed the army of the jihadis’ approach, and the soldiers were given an extra advantage when the attackers became bogged down in the mud for twenty-four hours after detouring from the main highway to follow a hidden track toward Konna. The short winter rains had turned the back roads of the north into nearly impassable quagmires.
On the night of Wednesday, January 9, 2013, having extracted themselves from the mud, but having also lost any element of surprise, the jihadis launched their assault. Konna residents cowered in their houses, listening to the explosions of heavy weaponry and the crackle of Kalashnikov fire, and watching muzzle flashes light up the night. The five-hundred-man government force pushed back the Al Qaeda attackers after six hours. “The military returned to their camp to eat around dawn, after having repulsed the first jihadi attack. They thought they had achieved a victory,” a schoolteacher in Konna told me a year later as we strolled past mud-walled compounds brightened with purple splashes of bougainvillea. A small mud mosque modeled after the Great Mud Mosque of Djenné—multiple spires, scaffolding made of bundles of palm sticks—rose over pools of mud, lagoons, and patches of marsh grass left from the winter rains.
“They ate, they were exultant,” the teacher remembered. There were fist pumps and high-fives with Konna’s denizens—expressions of satisfaction by men who had surprised themselves and staved off a disaster. “They were very pleased with themselves,” the teacher went on. “All was calm—and then the jihadis returned at nine o’clock in the morning.”
They had reinforcements this time. One hundred fifty pickup trucks filled with fighters attacked Konna from the north and the east. Another fifty vehicles from Gao circled around to the south. “They flanked them, they entered Konna, they were everywhere,” he told me. The jihadis fired heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Soldiers fled in panic through the dirt streets, some stripping off their camouflage uniforms and begging locals for civilian clothes. Fifty soldiers were killed and hundreds wounded.
That Thursday afternoon, the Islamists occupied Konna and summoned people to the mud mosque. “Your town was long terrorized by the Malian government, and now we have taken it,” a radical imam declared. “There is no mayor, no police, and no army. There is only us.” Shariah law would take effect immediately, he said, ordering women to cover themselves or face a whipping in the town square. That evening, townspeople watched nine more vehicles roll into town from the direction of Timbuktu. At the head of the procession, clad in a white turban and pale blue boubou, savoring the jihadis’ latest victory, was Iyad Ag Ghali. The capture of Konna had brought the jihadis one step closer to their goal: seizing control of the entire country and making a foreign intervention difficult, if not impossible. Ghali’s apparent plan was to wait for the arrival in the south of Abou Zeid’s militiamen, who were following a different road from Timbuktu. Then the two jihadi leaders would join forces on the highway, and lead their troops and vehicles all the way to Bamako.
16
Abdel Kader Haidara spent Thursday, January 10, the day that the jihadi forces of Iyad Ag Ghali captured Konna and prepared to advance further south, ensconced at the spacious, sunlit home of the American expatriate Emily Brady near the Niger River in Bamako. They had been raising money from European donors, running a crowdsourcing campaign, and sending cash to couriers in the north. Haidara was also dashing back and forth between Brady’s home and the double-arched Porte d’Entrée marking the north entrance to the capital, receiving his couriers and guiding them and their precious cargo to twenty-five storage places around the city.
But the dramatic events on the ground had thrown the rescue operation into disarray. Hundreds of jihadi vehicles had just seized Konna, stranding the team’s couriers and the manuscripts. Now they were threatening to take over all of Mali. The Malian army had fallen back to Sévaré, the site of the regional airport. But the demoralized troops were in no condition to resist the jihadi onslaught, and their commander was talking openly about shedding his uniform, slipping into the bush, and creating a guerrilla force to combat the rebels.
Diplomats and Malian government officials in Bamako expected that the new front line would quickly collapse; from Sévaré, the Islamist army would have an easy, seven-hour journey straight down the highway to Bamako. Nothing would then prevent them from turning Mali into “Sahelistan”—an armed terrorist state in the heart of Africa. They would likely seize Western hostages for ransom and institute Shariah law in the capital. An exodus of diplomatic families and other expatriates from Bamako had begun; the U.S. embassy had initiated a test of its emergency notification service to prepare for the evacuation of two thousand American citizens. Neither Haidara nor the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts he had by now secreted in the homes of his partners would be safe. There would be nowhere left to hide.
As the day wore on, Haidara kept a cell phone on each ear, and a cell phone in each hand, receiving reports from his couriers every few minutes: the sweat acted as an adhesive, gluing the devices to his ears. “Bring me more tea,” he said, signaling Brady’s housekeeper. He drank dozens of cups of heavily sweetened tea every day. The sugar rush kept him going. But the constant stress had caused his weight to balloon, raised his blood pressure, and given him a gastric ulcer.
“You shouldn’t drink so much because of your stomach,” Brady said. He waved her off and drank another cup.
While Haidara and Brady were confronting the growing danger in the north, momentous decisions were being made a continent away. At the Élysée Palace in Paris, the French president, François Hollande, held an emergency meeting with his cabinet, took urgent calls from his ambassador in Bamako and from the interim Malian president, Dioncounda Traoré—the former leader of Mali’s National Assembly, who had replaced the head of the military junta in a deal brokered by regional governments—and conferred with Barack Obama at the White House.
Since well before the jihadi takeover of northern Mali, the French had been intensifying their on-the-ground operations in the desert spaces that had been all but abandoned by the Malian military. In January 2011, following the abduction of two twenty-five-year-old French friends, Vincent Delory and Antoine de Léocour, from a restaurant in Niamey, Niger, a French surveillance plane had pursued Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb through the desert into eastern Mali; there, French Special Forces ambushed the kidnappers, and the hostages were killed in the exchange of fire. Ten months later, a dozen French Special Forces commandos in Sévaré, near Mopti, were deployed to hunt for the abducted French geologists in Hombori. The French had lost patience with the Malian military—fed up with their complicity with drug traffickers and reports of their selling of weapons and ammunition to the radicals in the desert, convinced that they couldn’t be induced to fight. “The French were disgusted [by the Malian army],” recalled Vicki Huddleston, then serving as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa in Washington.
France’s historic and linguistic ties to its former colony, the prospect of a jihadi-controlled state in Francophone West Africa, and the presence of eight thousand French expatriates in Bamako led Hollande quickly to a decision: France would take military action to rescue the country from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Hollande, the leader of a European power that had frequently intervened in French-speaking Africa in recent years, from Rwanda to the Côte d’Ivoire to the Central African Republic, with varying motives and varying degrees of support, this time enjoyed a strong popular mandate. In a poll, seventy-five percent of the French public said that they backed a rapid strike against the radicals. “The French people are ready to support a military operation as long as the objectives are clear and seem legitimate,” one French defense analyst tol
d The New York Times.
Hours after Iyad Ag Ghali marched triumphantly through the muddy alleys of Konna, people who lived near the Sévaré airport, thirty-six miles south, saw a helicopter land under cover of darkness and discharge fifteen white soldiers onto the tarmac. On Friday afternoon, January 11, a five-seat Aérospatiale Gazelle helicopter swept in low over Konna, and fired rockets at the militants’ positions. “At first we thought it belonged to the Malian army,” one trucker, who was burying the corpses of soldiers in a trench when the chopper arrived, told me a few days later, when I met him at a friend’s house in Sévaré. He returned to Konna and climbed onto his rooftop, “but all I could see was dust.” Militants fired back, striking the pilot in the groin, severing his femoral artery, and causing France’s first fatality in the conflict.
A second Gazelle engaged the jihadis later that afternoon. After dark, four Mirage 2000D jets carried out precise strikes on twelve jihadi vehicles and the military camp on a rise overlooking the Niger River in Konna. Ghali and his militants piled their dead and wounded into the beds of pickup trucks and began their long retreat north. Dozens of bodies littered the streets.
The Konna schoolteacher whom I had been talking to about the battle a year after it happened escorted me to the abandoned military camp on a rise above the Niger, briefly seized by the jihadis, and then attacked by French aircraft. A twelve-foot-deep crater filled with twisted metal and concrete was all that remained of two barracks in which the jihadis had encamped overnight. Back at his kindergarten and day-care center, the teacher unfolded a crudely made jihadi flag—fashioned from a piece of white linen, with a black field in the center and a pair of black-and-brown Kalashnikov rifles drawn in the white margins—and laid it out in front of me. He had ripped it off the radio antenna of a destroyed jihadi vehicle as the Al Qaeda soldiers fled from Konna. “This flag lived only for nineteen hours—from Thursday the 10th of January at 3:45 p.m. to Friday the 11th, at 10 a.m,” he had scrawled across the bottom margin.
Operation Serval, named after a small cat indigenous to the Sahara, gained momentum in the following days. French C-160 and An-124 transports airlifted ground troops, vehicles, and equipment into Bamako, and more French forces arrived by road from the Côte d’Ivoire. By January 15 France had eight hundred troops on the ground. The French government announced that it would triple the force to 2,500 soldiers by the end of January. Days later, the French bombed AQIM positions in the town of Diabily, near Djenné, captured by Abou Zeid and hundreds of his men on January 14. Hunkered down in the packed-dirt home of a Diabily farmer while his men camped under mango trees, the jihadi commander had planned to use Diabily as a base from which to continue his advance to Bamako. But French warplanes bombed them with precision, destroying dozens of vehicles. On January 17, the Islamists fled north under a withering French ground and air assault, camouflaging their remaining vehicles with so much foliage that they appeared to the population of Diabily like moving bushes.
The United States bore some responsibility for the Malian military debacle, having frittered away tens of millions of dollars on inadequate training of Malian soldiers. Now the Pentagon stepped into the fight: the United States airlifted hundreds of French troops and weapons aboard Air Force C-17 transport planes, refueled French warplanes with a KC-135 tanker aircraft, and provided drone surveillance. Vicki Huddleston, who had recently left the Department of Defense, called for vigorous U.S. “intelligence, equipment, financing, and training of a West African intervention force,” in The New York Times.
While Malians were quick to applaud the American assistance, some Malian intellectuals attacked the French intervention as a neocolonialist enterprise, and lashed out at former president Nicolas Sarkozy for his central role in the NATO attacks that had unseated Qaddafi and destabilized the region. But most Malians, including Abdel Kader Haidara, seemed ready to forgive the French missteps in Libya, and welcomed them with tricolors and the gratitude of the liberated.
17
Abdel Kader Haidara’s couriers were grounded, and war had broken out across the north. The French intervention had stopped the jihadis from capturing Bamako and declaring all of Mali a caliphate. But as hundreds of French troops advanced toward Timbuktu, the militants were enraged and threatening to take revenge. The manuscripts were at risk from both Al Qaeda, who seemed likely to lash out at anything that the West considered valuable, and from the French military, which had turned the entire north into a zone of gunfire and destruction. Missiles had slammed into jihadi barracks and military bases, command-and-control centers, villas appropriated by extremist commanders, and hundreds of vehicles. Mirage jets, Super Pumas, Tigers, Harfang drones, Alpha Jets, C-130s, and Mi-35s streaked across the skies of northern Mali. French helicopters pursued the radicals’ convoys into the roadless desert. Ground forces moved north to Timbuktu and Gao and sealed the roads to civilian traffic. A total of 791 footlockers containing 100,000 manuscripts remained hidden in safe houses in Timbuktu. They faced a growing threat of being found and destroyed; Haidara could not afford to wait. He was obliged to consider the only viable alternative to the road: the Niger River.
Emily Brady had pressed him from the early days of the evacuation to bring at least some of the manuscripts to government territory via the river, but Haidara had refused. He was worried, he said, about fast-moving currents and unpredictable winds, horrified by the possibility that a pinasse could capsize and send his manuscripts to the bottom of the Niger. But now that he had reluctantly changed his mind, the mule carts that had carried the chests from libraries to safe houses during the summer were called into action again. Down rough tracks through rice paddies and vegetable fields, too narrow for cars, the carts pulled stacks of trunks toward the river. Village chiefs, whom Haidara had come to know in his travels throughout the region, opened their mud-walled homes for temporary storage. In Toya, a village of Sorhai fishermen, consisting of a few dozen flat-roofed mud huts lining bare sandbanks about seven miles from Timbuktu, the hereditary chief, Mohannan Sidi Maiga, played a critical and clandestine role.
I visited Toya one sweltering August afternoon long after the boatlift was over, chartering a pinasse at Timbuktu’s main port of Kabara—a thirty-foot-long craft with five pink-cushioned benches, and a hull brightly painted in blue, yellow, and green arabesques. The pilot motored the pinasse slowly down the center of the olive green Niger. A canvas roof tethered to curving wooden supports shielded me from the sun. The river widened, and a steady wind blew across the bow, rocking the creaky wooden vessel alarmingly. The landscape on either side of the river was brown and barren, rising gently, speckled with grass and lone acacia trees. “The Niger, with its vast and misty horizons, is more like an inland ocean than a river,” wrote Félix Dubois in Timbuctoo the Mysterious, which I had brought along with me on this journey. “Its waters break upon its banks in the monotonously cadenced waves of the Mediterranean shores; and when winds, grown violent in the desert, swell its waves into a great race, seasickness will convince the most rebellious that the river Niger is of kin to oceans.”
After a turbulent, thirty-minute journey that made me understand Haidara’s hesitancy about transporting the manuscripts by river, we arrived in Toya, clambered past women scrubbing their laundry with bars of thick brown soap in the shallows, and walked through sandy warrens to the home of Maiga, a lanky man in a red T-shirt and gray slacks, whose skinny arms hung to his knees. “When the jihadis arrived [in April 2012] we sensed the danger, and people from Savama-DCI visited us here to tell us that they might need our help,” he told me, as we sat in plastic chairs beneath a burlap tarp, suspended by bamboo poles, in an outdoor meeting area next to his house.
One moonlit night in the middle of January, as the French ground forces rolled toward Timbuktu, the footlockers arrived in donkey carts. Maiga distributed them among the villagers. “Toya is off the track, it’s a little more hidden than the main port, so we figured they would be safe here,” he told me. Even so, Maiga knew t
hat the Islamic Police could raid the village at any time. “The jihadis had passed through here many times during the occupation, to make sure that women were covered and that people were applying their version of Islam,” he said. “They arrested nonmarried men and women, boys and girls, who were together. They tied their hands behind their backs and took them to Timbuktu.”
While he and other village chiefs were preparing the manuscripts for transport by water, Haidara’s team in Timbuktu traveled to Kabara, five miles south of Timbuktu. In the once bustling, now dead quiet port, where pinasses from Bamako and Mopti had, before the jihadi occupation, brought a steady flow of electronics, sacks of grain, and other goods—as well as Western tourists—to Timbuktu, the team struck up discreet conversations with boatmen. Most were idle, desperate for work, simmering with hostility toward the Islamists, and eager to pitch in to save the country’s patrimony.
Haidara’s team recruited dozens, and laid out the rules: Each pinasse would have two couriers and two captains, so that they could keep moving on the river twenty-four hours a day. No vessel could carry more than fifteen footlockers, to minimize losses should any boat be seized or sunk. The boats would load at beachfront villages such as Toya to avoid attracting the jihadis’ attention. Their destination would be Djenné, located on the floodplain between the Niger and the Bani Rivers, 223 miles and two days south of Timbuktu. Once the footlockers had been unloaded safely in government territory, trucks, taxis, and other vehicles would receive the cargo and continue the journey to Bamako, 332 miles further south.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 19
