The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  As Abou Zeid was fleeing Timbuktu and his comrades were destroying whatever manuscripts they could lay their hands on, I boarded a flight from Algiers to Bamako to piece together for The New York Review of Books the story of the jihadis’ 2012 conquest and to report on the French military effort to bring them down. The country was in turmoil, elated by the sudden French intervention, yet fearful that AQIM and Ansar Dine could inflict a last burst of savage violence. On my first morning in the capital, I paid a call on Imam Chérit Ousmane Mandani Haidara, no relation to Abdel Kader, a charismatic Sufi preacher who was much admired in Mali for being the first Muslim leader to denounce jihadi rule in the north. The Mawloud festival had begun in Bamako, and pilgrims crammed the courtyard of Imam Haidara’s green-domed Sufi mosque on a sealed-off street in the capital, protected by metal detectors and a battalion of red-bereted private guards. The imam received me in a dusty room above his mosque, furnished with gold-painted wingback chairs and sofas and blood-red carpets. Jihadi sympathizers had infiltrated the capital, he told me. He was fearful of assassination, too terrified to leave his compound. What’s more, his moderate Islamic organization, Ansar Dine, a Sufi group with one million followers and branches across West and Central Africa, had been tainted by Iyad Ag Ghali’s appropriation of the name. His followers were being harrassed by the police and army in several African countries, accused of being terrorists. “Iyad Ag Ghali is a Wahhabi, his Ansar Dine is not the same as my Ansar Dine, I am a pacifist,” insisted the imam, a tall and imposing figure in his fifties, swathed in a golden boubou and a green wool scarf. “They created Ansar Dine only to make trouble for me.” The Mawloud Festival at Haidara’s mosque went off without any trouble, but the imam’s fears of jihadist infiltration in the capital would be realized some time later, when Al Qaeda terrorists threw grenades and sprayed automatic-weapons fire at La Terrasse, a popular bar-restaurant frequented by expatriates in Bamako, killing two Westerners and three Malians.

  I set out the next day for the north in a hired Toyota Land Cruiser. The tarmac quickly turned to dirt, and my driver fell in behind a half-mile-long French military convoy heading to Timbuktu. In 1994 I had traveled with the French army during Operation Turquoise in Rwanda, and the scenes were vividly familiar. French flags hung from mud-brick huts, jeeps and trucks kicked up clouds of dust, and children waved from the roadside. The French intervention in Rwanda had been cloaked in ambiguity: though French president François Mitterrand had presented it to the world as a humanitarian campaign to save Tutsis from genocide, its real intent seemed to be to carve out a safe haven for the Hutu génocidaires, and prevent Paul Kagame’s Anglophone Rwandan Patriotic Front from seizing control of the country. The mission in Mali, however, was far more straightforward and was moving ahead with what seemed like near-universal approval.

  From time to time on the journey north I found myself thinking about my old acquaintance Abdel Kader, whom I had not spoken to since before the jihadi occupation began, and speculating on the fate of his manuscripts. I had imagined that Haidara and his colleagues might have buried them in the desert, as people had done during French colonial times. I had no idea that at that moment a fleet of boats was heading upriver from Timbuktu, bearing seven hundred footlockers toward safe havens in Bamako.

  After ten hours and 380 miles, I pulled into Mopti, a Niger River port once favored by backpackers and other adventurous travelers, and a jumping-off point to visit the Dogon people, an animist tribe that dwelled in the nearby falaise, or cliffs. Now hotels, travel agencies, and once popular cafés such as the Restaurant Bar Bozo—noted for its views of sunset over the river—all stood deserted, having shut down following the kidnappings and killings of Westerners. Here the Niger River came into view for the first time since we had left Bamako; the handful of pinasses that I saw motoring slowly upstream might well have been loaded with Haidara’s precious cargo, though I had no awareness of the boatlift that was then in progress.

  Shortly after dawn the next morning, under a slate-gray sky, my driver took me toward Konna. Our plan was to follow the French army all the way to Timbuktu and, if our timing was fortuitous, observe the moment of liberation from jihadi rule. But Malian soldiers at a roadblock just past the airport at Sévaré had other ideas. Blocked from advancing by the surly troops, we parked on the roadside, beside a pancake-flat sea of thorny acacias and desert grass, and over the next hour another twenty vehicles filled with film crews and newspaper and newsmagazine reporters took their place along the shoulder. The morning dragged on, the sun rising higher in the now cobalt-blue sky, temperature soaring into the low one hundreds, journalists kicking the dirt in frustration, the soldiers gruffly refusing repeated entreaties to let the convoy through.

  A French paratroop officer roared up in a jeep and tried to intervene on our behalf, eventually directing us back down the road to the airport. Outside the front gate, a Malian colonel in crisp fatigues and Ray-Bans curtly informed the pack of journalists that he made the rules, not the French, and the “theater of operations” would remain sealed off to the press. French TV had reported that day that Malian government soldiers had murdered eleven suspected Islamists and thrown their bodies down a well in Sévaré, and some speculated that the soldiers’ obstinance toward the press may have stemmed from that unsavory revelation.

  At the Hotel Kanaga on the river in Mopti—the only functioning hotel for Westerners in the city—I sat at the poolside bar that night beside a handful of other reporters and aid workers, swatting away mosquitoes in the tropical heat, and listened to French radio reports of a hostage drama across the border that served as a reminder of the spillover effect of the Malian war and the potential for further turbulence in North Africa. Forty Islamic militants had seized dozens of Western employees at the In Amenas gasworks in the Algerian Sahara. Algerian security forces had attacked the terrorists, and thirty-eight hostages—including three Americans—and twenty-nine Islamists had been killed in the crossfire. The militant who had orchestrated the attack from a secret enclave in the desert was identified as none other than Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed cigarette smuggler turned emir of Gao, on the run from French forces, and seeking revenge for the routing of his fighters in northern Mali.

  In the months leading up to the French invasion, Belmokhtar’s independent streak had led to ugly quarrels with his masters in the Algerian mountains, a dispute that had apparently culminated in this monumental act of terror. In October 2012 the fourteen members of AQIM’s Shura Council had rebuked him in a pointed letter, later discovered by an Associated Press reporter in an abandoned Al Qaeda barracks in Timbuktu. The Council chastised him for failing to stage “spectacular attacks” in the Sahara, in contrast to his chief rival, Abou Zeid; making only a feeble effort to acquire weapons; and “poorly” managing the kidnapping of the Canadian diplomats in 2008, “trading the weightiest case (Canadian diplomats!) for the most meager price (700,000 euros)!” Most egregiously, Belmokhtar had, it seemed, aired the organization’s “dirty laundry” and revealed closely guarded information to rival militant groups. “Did he not intentionally depict [himself] as the great leader in the field while depicting the organization’s leadership as a failure?” the council asked. “If not for God’s grace, he would have splashed out secrets to the whole world and the heavens above.”

  With the officious and mundane language of a performance review at a law firm or a bank, the Shura Council further rebuked him for refusing to take his superiors’ phone calls, ignoring summonses to meetings, and neglecting to file expense reports. Such behavior could have “destructive effects for the entity of the organisation and would tear it apart,” wrote the secretary of the Shura Council, which was dominated by former senior members of the GIA, the Islamist radicals who had murdered tens of thousands of civilians during Algeria’s civil war, and the GSPC, the Salafi spinoff that kidnapped Westerners for ransom and bombed embassies and other facilities in north Africa in the early 2000s. “Why do the successive emirs of the regi
on only have difficulties with you?” they challenged Belmokhtar. As their final insult, the council announced that they had “suspended” him from his command.

  In December 2012, Belmokhtar had issued his response: he split from Al Qaeda and formed a new organization, Al Mouwakoune Bi-Dima, Arabic for “Those Who Sign with Blood,” taking the name from an Islamist rebel cell in the 1990s Algerian civil war. The January 2013 carnage at the Saharan gasworks, prefaced by demands for the release of one hundred prisoners from Algeria’s jails, might well have been Belmokhtar’s grotesque effort to upstage his bosses, and to show that he could be every bit as ruthless and murderous toward Western hostages as the fanatic Abou Zeid.

  Gao fell on January 26, and on the evening of the 27th, while I was still sitting by the roadblock at Sévaré, waiting to cross into former jihadi territory, a French armored column, supported by Tiger attack helicopters and a battalion of parachutists, entered Timbuktu without firing a shot. Mohammed Touré, Haidara’s right-hand man, was one of thousands of residents who rode in cars, trucks, and motorcycles through the dusty streets, honking their horns in celebration.

  “Merci François Hollande, Merci,” one ecstatic young man, draped in a French tricolor, chanted over and over as jeep-loads of French soldiers roared past. At the radio station, the manager patched together equipment and returned to the air, playing the first music that had been heard in Timbuktu in nine months. And hundreds of jihadis headed north, to the remote mountain sanctuary that some of them knew well. There they would make their final stand against the French army.

  19

  General Bernard Barrera, the newly appointed commander of French ground forces in Mali, landed in Bamako on January 21, ten days after the start of Operation Serval, and on the very day that was to mark the start of the now canceled Mawloud festival in Timbuktu. He set up a temporary headquarters in an airport hangar, flew by helicopter one week later to the just-liberated towns of Gao and Timbuktu, and established a forward command post at the U.S.-built military base in Tessalit, the gateway to the Adrar des Ifoghas massif. Iyad Ag Ghali’s men had occupied the compound for nearly a year and stripped it bare. In the looted headquarters, Barrera—a third-generation infantry officer from Marseille and a veteran of Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, and Afghanistan—laid plans for a search-and-destroy mission against the jihadis. In Bamako, Mali’s army chief of staff had predicted that the radicals would take refuge in the most impregnable corner of the Adrar des Ifoghas. “Go to the Ametettaï Valley,” he had told Barrera. “That’s where you will find the enemy.”

  Barrera knew that they had to move quickly. He had brought a copy of Joseph Césaire Joffre’s memoir of his expedition to Timbuktu in 1893–1894, and the descriptions by the future World War I commander in chief of French forces on the Western Front, of “desolate, near-desert country under a burning sun,” the “scarcity of water,” “intense heat,” and the “mountain defiles of difficult access” weighed on him. The extreme conditions in the Adrar des Ifoghas and the hundreds-miles-long supply lines would wear down Barrera’s men quickly. “We have to seize this valley in one week to ten days, or the battle is lost,” he told his staff. The stakes were significant: a French withdrawal without a decisive defeat of the jihadis would give Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb an enormous propaganda victory, potentially drawing thousands more recruits to the cause, and throwing Mali into deeper chaos. For Abdel Kader Haidara, who was following the looming battle in the north as best he could from his Bamako sanctuary, the crushing of the extremists was essential. Only then, he knew, could he finish his monumental task, and return the 377,000 manuscripts to their desert home.

  The Amettetaï is one of four interlocking valleys in the heart of the massif, and the only one with a year-round supply of water. For decades it served as a sanctuary for Tuareg insurgents, drug traffickers, and Islamist extremists. The valley runs east to west for twenty-five miles, and is eight hundred yards wide at its western entrance. Low gray and black granite hills, eroded to rubble and pocked with caves, rise on both sides. Fields of boulders and rocks, with countless crawl spaces, cover the valley floor. Two sandy ancient riverbeds, or oueds, one running north to south and the other running east to west, become torrential rivers during the two or three annual rainstorms. The bare rocky hills drive the summer rain straight down into the oueds, where wells can easily reach the water table—the permeable layer beneath the earth’s surface in which water saturates the soil and fills all gaps between rocks. At the north end of the valley, in the middle of the oued, stands a hamlet, Ametettaï—four abandoned stone huts built by nomadic herders. Nearby, in the shade of thorny acacias and fruit trees, four large cavities in the sand, dug by Tuareg nomads to thirty feet, contain ample reserves of water.

  In late January, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, Iyad Ag Ghali, and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid dispersed with their jihadi followers into the desert. Belmokhtar retreated to the no-man’s-land along Mali’s border with Algeria, to carry on his campaign of carnage and hostage taking. Ghali fled north from Kidal and may have sought temporary refuge in a mountainous region of Darfur, in Western Sudan. (Other reports placed him in the western Sahara region of Morocco, and the northern desert of Mauritania.) Abou Zeid and at least six hundred fighters from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, including the men who had burned four thousand manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute, retreated to the Ametettaï, where they prepared for a long siege. The fighters buried mines at the valley’s entrance points, camouflaged their pickup trucks beneath acacia trees, set up sniper positions in the hills, and filled caves with food, water, guns, and ammunition. The aim of Abou Zeid and his jihadi cadre was clear: hold out in their rock-walled sanctuaries, outlast the foreigners, force them to retreat from the valley, and live to fight another day.

  At the army base in Tessalit, forty-eight miles northwest of the Ametettaï, Barrera devised a three-pronged attack. One battalion from a Chadian expeditionary force—battle-hardened men used to fighting in equally harsh terrain—would enter the valley from the east. A six-hundred-man mechanized battalion, consisting of infantry and armored vehicles, supported by four 120-millimeter mortars and two long-range CAESAR howitzers, would assault from the west. Four companies of troops from the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment, France’s rapid reaction force, would enter from the north. These four companies of Foreign Legionnaires would divide the valley in two, capture Ametettaï village, and cut off the jihadis’ access to water.

  On February 22, the Chadian battalion made an initial foray into the Ametettaï through a narrow opening at the valley’s eastern extremity, in armored trucks and on foot. The jihadis were prepared for them. The fervor that they had displayed in Timbuktu—the fanatical certainty that had driven them to declare war on the city’s music, manuscripts, and culture of tolerance—assumed a terrifying new intensity on the battlefield. Suicide bombers, wearing explosive belts filled with steel pellets, threw themselves on patrols at the entrance to the valley. Twenty-six Chadian soldiers were killed and seventy injured in close combat. Helicopters evacuated the dead and wounded, and the weary survivors returned by truck to Tessalit, the U.S.-built base being used as the French command center. They spent three days convalescing. Then they declared that they were ready to reengage. Before dawn on February 25, they joined 1,200 French soldiers for a coordinated assault. “You’re going to fight determined men, men who are dug into strong defensive positions,” Barrera told the troops before they departed. “We are going to suffer losses, but we have to continue fighting.” He gave his men a maximum of six days to take the valley, an even lower figure than his initial assessment. “Beyond that,” he told them, “we will have surpassed our physical limits.”

  Captain Raphaël Oudot de Dainville had arrived at Tessalit by troop transport plane from Niger on February 22—the same day that the Chadians died at the eastern entrance to the Ametettaï Valley. A third-generation military man and a 2005 graduate of the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr, considered the West Point of France
, Oudot de Dainville was an infantry officer in the French Foreign Legion, comprised of French officers and international recruits. These men, often fleeing from checkered pasts in their home countries and seeking a second chance in life, were legendary for their esprit de corps. The troops under Oudot de Dainville’s command came from England, the Balkans, Poland, Russia, and half a dozen former states of the Soviet Union, and had seen action in the Côte d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, and Afghanistan. He had led his parachutists into the Tagab Valley in Kapisa Province northeast of Kabul in the winter of 2010, where the Taliban had put up a fierce resistance, and where Oudot de Dainville had first confronted the fight-to-the-death ethos of Islamist fanatics. He considered his men to be tougher, more disciplined, and more used to hardship than their French-born counterparts. “They push everything to the extreme,” he said.

  Before dawn, Oudot de Dainville and his soldiers climbed into military trucks at Tessalit and headed south through the desert. They bounced on sandbags for ten hours over a moonscape of stones, pebbles, and boulders. At three-thirty in the afternoon, the men dismounted from their trucks in the oued, near the Ametettaï’s northern entrance. Sappers checked for mines buried in the sand. The men walked in a tight formation through the ancient riverbed, wary of ambushes. The temperature was 122 degrees. Each man wore a helmet, flak jacket, and sixty-pound backpack filled with six plastic bottles of water, meals-ready-to-eat (MRE), and ammunition. They carried French-made M4 rifles; antitank missiles, mortar tubes, and disassembled 12.7-millimeter machine guns. The hamlet of Amettetaï was four miles from their point of entry into the valley. In between lurked hundreds of fanatical fighters, including Abou Zeid, the jihadi commander and the scourge of Timbuktu, dug into caves with enough water, food, and ammunition to hold out for weeks.