Cheikh Diouara remembered exactly where he was when the jihadists began their wholesale destruction of Timbuktu’s tombs. It was early on the morning of Saturday, June 30, and the video journalist was traveling to a meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Saint Petersburg. He had been in Timbuktu filming the profaned tomb of Sidi Mahmud, and UNESCO had invited him to show the committee his footage as evidence of what had happened. There had been a mix-up with his baggage, however, and he’d missed his connecting flight, so he was stuck in Casablanca. At seven a.m. his cellphone rang.
The voice at the other end belonged to a young al-Qaeda fighter Diouara knew from Timbuktu. They had become friends after the journalist took a few photos of him posing with his gun.
“I think they are going to smash the mausoleums,” the mujahid told him. “They’ve just been talking about it.” A group of jihadists had gone to the hardware store in Timbuktu’s market to buy the pickaxes and hoes they needed, he said, “then they’re going to go and do it.”
Diouara was stuck. His instincts told him to hurry back to Mali, but the next flight he could get to Bamako was four days away. He wrote a quick story for Reuters, then called his young fighter friend back. The destruction hadn’t yet begun.
“When we’re over there near the tombs, I won’t be able to talk to you,” said the fighter. What about just sending a text? No, he didn’t know how to write. That didn’t matter, Diouara persisted; it could be empty, as long as they both knew it was the signal that the attacks on the mausoleums had started. The jihadist agreed.
A short time later, Diouara received a blank message.
It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that the destruction began in the week the thirty-sixth session of the World Heritage Committee was meeting in Saint Petersburg. Tension between the MNLA and AQIM had been simmering for months, and on Wednesday, June 27, at Gao, it finally broke out into an open firefight. It ended with the MNLA’s secretary-general, Bilal Ag Cherif, fleeing his own headquarters, while the body of a senior MNLA commander, a Malian army defector, Colonel Bouna Ag Teyib, was dragged through the streets behind a pickup. Al-Qaeda followed this victory by ordering the MNLA to leave their base at Timbuktu airport by five p.m. the following afternoon. The MNLA meekly complied, leaving the jihadists the sole authority in northern Mali. “From that moment it was their kingdom,” the city elder Jansky recalled.
The delegates at the UNESCO meeting gathered at the Tauride Palace, an opulent eighteenth-century mansion created for Catherine the Great’s lover Prince Grigory Potemkin, with views over the Neva River. Their business was essentially to manage two lists. The first of these, the World Heritage List, consisted of a thousand of the world’s most precious treasures: monuments, archaeological sites, and natural phenomena that were deemed of “outstanding universal value.” The second, the List of World Heritage in Danger, was a subset of the first, and comprised those locations threatened by deterioration, natural disaster, or war. The UN body deemed that “major operations” were necessary to protect these sites, and assistance was requested.
After a late Malian government submission, the committee that week debated whether to move the mausoleums of Timbuktu onto the Danger list. Giving its formal response, recorded in the minutes as Decision 36 COM 7B.106, the committee congratulated the Malian government for having expressed its concern, appealed to the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States to ensure that the cultural heritage of north Mali was protected, and—the fateful decision—agreed to inscribe the monuments in question on the list of threatened world sites. UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova would later try to explain this move. It was not her decision, but that of the committee. It was also a no-win situation. “I know there is this thinking that we don’t have to tease [the jihadists]; we have to appease them, which I understand in some cases,” she said. “But there are others, especially now when everything is so globalized, everything is so visible and so connected, where UNESCO is more criticized for not doing enough than for provoking destruction.”
What was most unfortunate was the committee’s timing: the decision was made on Thursday, June 28, the day the jihadists, still pumped up after their victory at Gao, forced the MNLA to retreat from Timbuktu. The next morning, on the Muslim holy day, they went to the city’s mosques to speak against the cult of Timbuktu’s saints. The morning after that, Diouara received his phone call in Casablanca.
Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, the Islamic Police leader from a nearby village, was ordered to carry out the destruction. He began on the northern edge of the city, in Abaraju, with the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmud. They had already attacked the tomb of this powerful saint, and now they finished it off. The tomb was a boxlike construction made of rammed earth and stones, which stood on a hill by a tree, encircled by the graves of the saint’s disciples, who were said to number 167. It was a quiet spot, a place where people came daily to pray, pay their respects, and ask for the saint’s help. At eight a.m., around a hundred jihadists, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and carrying the hoes, pickaxes, crowbars, and hammers they had bought in the hardware store, surrounded the tomb and started to attack it. Bystanders were kept away by machine guns pointed in their direction. “Nobody was allowed to approach,” Jansky recalled.
The tomb was not built to withstand any kind of assault. The men were soon able to pry away one of the walls with a crowbar and hack it into rubble. A black-bearded jihadist explained to camera his reasons for desecrating the mausoleum. “There is a Kuranic law that says a tomb must be only a few centimeters above the ground,” he said. “And that no one must be venerated but God. It is for that reason that we are destroying the tomb.” By the time they had finished, the building was a heap of earth, stones, and timber spars. The demolition team then moved on to the tomb of Shaykh Muhammad Mahmud al-Arawani, in the same cemetery.
“We are all Muslims,” said the jihadist spokesman Sanda Ould Bouamama. “UNESCO is what?” This was just the start of their cleansing of the city: “Today, Ansar Dine is going to destroy all the mausoleums in the town. All of them, without exception.” Redbeard Hamaha described those who had worshipped at the shrines as being “driven by Satan”: “It is forbidden by Islam to pray on tombs and ask for blessings,” he told a reporter. “Ansar Dine is showing the rest of the world, especially Western countries, that whether they want it or not, we will not let the younger generation believe in shrines … regardless of what the UN, UNESCO, the International Criminal Court, or ECOWAS [the Economic Community of West African States] have to say. We do not recognize these organizations. The only thing we recognize is the court of God, sharia. Sharia is a divine obligation. People don’t get to choose whether they like it or not.”
At around ten a.m., the men with the hoes and pickaxes moved east, to the cemetery of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti, where Barth had witnessed al-Bakkai negotiate with his brothers 158 years before. They destroyed more mausoleums here, including that of the shaykh himself, and al-Mahdi declared: “We are going to wipe out from our landscape all that does not belong there.” In the afternoon, al-Mahdi’s gang moved south to the cemetery of Alfa Moy, where they worked until sunset.
Some residents cried as they watched their holiest sites being smashed; others were mute, uncomprehending. That night, the town went to bed at dusk. “Everyone was exhausted,” Air Mali recalled. “It felt as if the days of Timbuktu were finished.”
The rampage continued the next day, with three more mausoleums demolished in Jingere Ber. Air Mali sensed a method in their assault: they were attacking the tombs at the edges of the town, the cornerstones of its spiritual defense. On the third day, the jihadists chose a new target. In a wall on the west side of the Sidi Yahya mosque, beneath a triangular lintel, was an elegant wooden door embossed in traditional Timbuktu style with decorative metalwork. According to local belief, it was to remain shut until the end of days. “The symbolism of the Sidi Yahya door was quite simply there are people who said when you open the door, it is the end of the world,” Grand Imam Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti explained. It wasn’t magic or idolatry—just a myth that had been invented for a pragmatic purpose. “The ancients told the story to the little children to stop them from approaching the door, because behind it the wall was not very solid and there was a risk it would collapse on people. The people thought that you had to leave it. It was a way of keeping people safe.”
The Salafists saw it as heresy. “Their mentality was to defy that,” said Ben Essayouti. “They wanted to demonstrate that it was not true, although of course everyone knew it was not true. It was simply something we told the children to make them afraid.”
On Monday morning, a group of gunmen in turbans approached the mosque. They dragged out the wooden lintel first, which came away easily. The doors posed more of a problem: the men had to put their backs into that, ripping them out of the sunbaked earth that held them in place. A black-turbaned jihadist, aware of the video camera filming him, came away from the task rubbing his neck. “God is great,” he said, adding with sarcasm: “And now is the time of the end of the world.”
People among the small crowd of Timbuktiens who had gathered to watch began to cry.
Even two years later, this moment was raw for the grand imam. “When the mausoleums were destroyed, that was the moment when morale dropped,” he said, his voice weary. “For them it is perhaps Islam. The hadiths say that near the end of times Islam will be divided into seventy-three sects, and a single sect will be the real truth. We are witnessing that. Every day you hear a new sect that manifests itself, declaring itself. For them, in their spirit, these things are the truth. People now are so confused.”
Many blamed the World Heritage Committee. “If UNESCO had not said what they did, the jihadists would not have touched the cultural heritage,” said Air Mali. “Given what UNESCO decreed, they had to attack that which they had forgotten to attack.”
The Crisis Committee wrote to their contacts in Bamako afterward, asking them to stop denouncing the jihadists’ behavior, while the librarians in Bamako took it as a further spur to try to keep people quiet. “Every time UNESCO spoke about the manuscripts, I phoned them and said, no, you must not speak about the manuscripts,” Haidara said.
The day after the destruction of the mausoleums, Haidara took a call from a senior UNESCO official in Paris. The organization’s job was to work for global heritage, the official said, and when it was in danger, they were obliged to act. So why did Haidara call them every time they spoke up and tell them to keep quiet?
“I told him we are in the middle of something very important, and if you continue to speak to the media about the manuscripts, the people there will become aware of what we are doing,” said Haidara. “The next day he called again and told me, ‘Okay, we are going to have a deal between you and me. Every day I am going to call you, you are going to tell us what is happening.’ I said okay.”
From that moment, the official would call every morning, and Haidara would give him an update. “We had a lot of conversations afterwards,” he remembered. “They understood.”
Diouara understood something too: the jihadists’ rampage meant they had stopped trying to win over the people of the city. They had given up the pretense and now revealed themselves as they really were. “They had entered into a new phase of the occupation, a decisive phase,” he said. “I understood then that there would be mutilations, whipping, and everything else that was to come.”
THE OUTPOURING of fury that rained down on the jihadists came from all quarters and all corners of the globe. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) declared the destruction of the mausoleums a war crime, which her office had authority to investigate. Six West African leaders issued a statement encouraging the ICC to take action and called on Mali to ask the UN to intervene militarily against the groups in northern Mali. The U.S. State Department “strongly condemned” the destruction, while Russia described it as a “barbarian” act that could “only arouse indignation.” For France it was “intolerable,” a “systematic violation of places of reverence and prayer,” which for centuries had been part of the soul of the famed sub-Saharan city. At Paris’s request, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2056, which called for sanctions on the jihadists responsible and condemned “the desecration, damage and destruction of sites of holy, historic and cultural significance” in the city.
In southern Mali the reaction was equally hostile. On July 4, Muslim leaders in Bamako marched against the Islamists in the north. “No to imported Islam, yes to the Islam of our parents,” read one slogan, while a protester explained that “Timbuktu was founded on a pure Islam, respectful of men, of all men.” The culture minister, Diallo Fadima Touré, called on the UN to “take concrete steps to stop these crimes against the cultural heritage of my people.” Even the MNLA, without irony, called for international intervention, asking for “the USA, France and all other countries who want to stand against Ansar Dine, Boko Haram and al-Qaeda who are now holding Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal to help us kill them and help the people in those cities.”
The most unlikely outburst, however, came from the hideout, probably in the Kabylie mountains east of Algiers, of the AQIM leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel.
To mark the start of the holy month of Ramadan on July 20, the emir and his advisers put the finishing touches to an eighty-page memo titled “General Guidelines Concerning the Islamic Jihadist Project in Azawad” and fired it off to his commanders in Mali. Pages of this internal document would not be seen by the wider world until the following year, when it was found by reporters digging through the rubble and paperwork Timbuktu’s occupiers had left behind. The document was carefully structured, with criticism bracketed fore and aft by positive remarks about the great opportunity of the “new baby” of the Islamic Azawad project. In parts it included the sort of business-speak one might find in a company report: there were several mentions of “external stakeholders” and warnings against “high visibility on the current political and military stage,” as well as concerns about the al-Qaeda brand. The gist of the memo was clear: AQIM’s Saharan branch was in danger of screwing up this whole jihadist project.
The great powers might not be in a position to use force because of the exhaustion of their armies and the ongoing global financial crisis, Droukdel wrote, but they would nevertheless try to hinder the creation of an Islamic state of Azawad. It was probable—even certain—that they would undertake some sort of military intervention or exert pressure through a complete economic, political, and military embargo, at which point AQIM’s brigades would be forced to retire to their bases in the desert. Bearing in mind that al-Qaeda was a red rag to the West, it was vital that they disguise themselves. “Be silent and make it look as if you are a ‘domestic’ movement that has its own causes and concerns,” Droukdel advised. “Foreign intervention will be imminent and rapid if we [AQIM] have a hand in government and our influence is clearly asserted.”
They must also avoid taking risks. The speed with which AQIM’s local commanders were moving against the Islam of the region was a huge mistake. “Among your foolish policies,” Droukdel noted in one scathing paragraph, was “the rush to apply sharia without taking into account the principle of progressive application in an environment where the populations have not known religious precepts for centuries.” Previous experience had proved that applying sharia in this way “will lead to people’s rejecting the religion, and engender hatred toward the mujahideen.” It would, consequently, lead to the failure of “our experiment.”
Specific examples of this hastiness, which he and AQIM’s ruling council ordered them not to repeat, included the destruction of the mausoleums and the imposition of the hadd punishments. Of the decision to smash the mausoleums, he wrote: “We are not powerful enough today, foreign intervention is imminent and the people have known the Islamic conquest for only a short time … The side effects of this action are not trivial and we will not be forgiven if we carry on in this way.” But their “gravest error” was the falling-out with the MNLA, who were necessary partners in the struggle to achieve al-Qaeda’s aims, even if they did not appear natural friends. Droukdel despaired at the breakdown of agreements with them and with the Arab rebel movement. These groups, he wrote, should be used to build the state and defend against foreign intervention. In his eyes, the agreement that had been drawn up between the MNLA and al-Qaeda was a great “conquest” that surpassed all AQIM’s hopes for a movement that supposedly had secular tendencies.
In sum, while al-Qaeda should lend its resources to the state of Azawad, it was in neither its interest nor its capacity to govern the territory when its overriding objective was global jihad. It should therefore keep to the background, supporting a government of Azawad led by Iyad Ag Ghaly and Ansar Dine, but which included representatives of all communities in the north—the MNLA, the Arabs, the Songhay, and the Fulani—and focus its energies on the big picture.
“Finally,” he concluded, “we consider these directives and this general vision as the best way of avoiding the errors of the past, which we hope not to make again.”
At whom was Droukdel’s memo aimed? Surely not Abou Zeid, a Droukdel protégé whose kidnappings had dramatically raised the organization’s profile and its cash reserves. More likely it was Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed commander who led the fighting against the MNLA in Gao. Belmokhtar would soon split with AQIM altogether to set up the rival Signers in Blood brigade, and would write to the global leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, telling him that Droukdel was deeply out of touch. Given that jihadists had already dragged the body of Colonel Bouna Ag Teyib through the streets of Gao and forced the MNLA’s secretary-general to flee his headquarters, he had a point: the moment for patching up relations with the MNLA was surely long gone.
Whatever AQIM’s Saharan commanders thought of the emir’s words, they had little effect. Locked on their path, administering a territory where it was a struggle to keep the lights on, Timbuktu’s new leaders moved even more quickly than before.
FOR THE LIBRARIANS IN BAMAKO, the evacuation was growing urgent. Haidara spent his days in a cycle of fruitless fund-raising meetings. He toured the embassies again, contacting “friends of Mali” (“Mali,” said Haidara, “has many friends”) to see if anything had changed, but these contacts gave the same response over and over: “It was ‘No, no, no, we cannot do anything like that,’” he recalled. “That’s the national heritage of Mali, we are friends of Mali, and if our country starts to help you do that, Mali will start accusing us. We cannot get mixed up in that.” It seemed to him that his contacts were no longer talking to him in the same respectful tone they had once used. Finally, one “friend” explained to him that the international partners had no confidence in what was being done in the country, so they would not spend money there. Haidara felt he had been duped.
“I understood many things,” he said. “It reminded me of many meetings that I had had with other people. They were not open with us.”
The librarians tried a new tack after that, making appointments with the senior figures in the Malian government in charge of heritage. They began with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the government department responsible for the Ahmad Baba institute. The Timbuktu manuscripts were threatened, Haidara told them, but the librarians did not have the means to save them. “What are you going to do to help?”
“The way I see you today, I know you are serious,” the secretary-general of the department told him. “But I am going to tell you something. We cannot help you politically, or materially, in any way. The only thing I can tell you is that all you are able to do in this business, you must do it. We are behind you.”
Next they went to the Ministry of Culture, which oversaw the private manuscript collections. Haidara gave the same speech and got the same answer. You need to do it, he recalled being told, we are behind you. “I told them I would try,” Haidara said, “but I wanted them to be aware of it, because if there were problems they had to help me.” The officials agreed.
With the backing of the ministries, Haidara now called his contacts abroad. He had a friend in Geneva who told him to come to Switzerland, and even paid for his plane ticket. Haidara spent several days there, meeting people who dealt with world heritage, including some who had worked to save manuscripts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They told him he should start the operation soon, but take it slowly and carefully. Even if he managed to smuggle only a single manuscript out of the city each day, it would be worthwhile. One woman gave him a piece of advice that would stick with him. “She said you must never lose someone who starts to work with you,” he recalled. “You must always keep them happy, even if it is not in your interest, even if they make wrong calculations. She said it to me three times.”
He returned from Switzerland with a lot to think about, but he still had no money.
Ismael at that time also wanted to travel. For a man who liked to spend an hour every morning and evening walking in the open desert around Timbuktu, Bamako was claustrophobic. The village Mungo Park had passed through in 1796 was now a city of more than two million, and thousands more were arriving from the north every week. Its cinder-block homes stretched for twenty miles; its streets and bridges were crowded with honking vehicles that coughed brown smog into the humid air. Ismael’s sense of being choked was compounded by the political tension that occasionally spilled over into gunfights in the streets, including an attempted countercoup by the deposed president’s guard that left fourteen people dead.
“I was not good in Bamako,” he said.
Exiled from Timbuktu, with the manuscripts of his Fondo Kati library hidden, he had little to tie him to Mali and its crisis. He decided to return to his second home, in Andalusia.
The other librarians understood. “It happened that our friend Ismael was tired,” said Haidara. “He said, ‘Good. I am going to let you carry on.’”
“The truth was that when we were looking for solutions, Ismael had no problem,” Maiga said. “He was with us to give us ideas. By the time we made the decision to intervene, he was already in Spain. He had secured his manuscripts before going, and he left.”
He did not come back.
BY JULY, Alkadi was also in Bamako. The Ahmad Baba researcher with the easy smile and the sleepy eyes had left Timbuktu with his family in late April. After a nightmarish bus journey that lasted almost a week, they reached Segu, where he found a cheap house to rent. But there was nothing for him to do there, and with no money coming in, he and Fatouma decided in June that he should go to Bamako. Every day Alkadi went to offer himself for employment in the small first-floor offices in Kalaban Coura that the director, Maiga, had hired. Even here, there wasn’t much work: the only materials the institute had were a few digitized documents that had been brought south on hard drives, plus several hundred manuscripts Maiga had acquired in Bamako.
On July 23, however, Maiga called Alkadi in. There was something very difficult that he needed to ask him, but he had to be very discreet.
“No problem,” said Alkadi. “If I can do it, it’s not a problem. I will try.”
The director related some of what Haidara had learned on his Swiss trip: how manuscript libraries suffered catastrophic losses during the Iraq War, and how others had been destroyed in Sudan and Libya. The institute’s manuscripts were also now at risk of being destroyed, Maiga said: if the Islamists didn’t do it, there was a strong chance the MNLA might.
“What I want you to do,” he concluded, “is bring the manuscripts out of the libraries in Timbuktu.”
“No problem,” said Alkadi.
It was typical of Alkadi to respond in a calm, even cool, manner, which was why Maiga had asked him. The director was still new in his job, but he had taken soundings among senior staff in Timbuktu as to who could be trusted with a special and sensitive mission, and Alkadi’s name had been the first on the list. Two other agents would accompany him. One was Abdoulaye Sadidi, who also had the reputation of being levelheaded. The third was someone whom neither of them knew well, but who would be invaluable since he was the manager of the Ahmad Baba library: Bouya Haidara.
Maiga asked Alkadi to call in the other two; then he laid out the plan.
The “agents” should make their way to Timbuktu, where they would contact Abba Traoré, the caretaker at the old building on the Rue de Chemnitz, and tell him to let them into the depository at the back. There they would pack up a few hundred manuscripts—they would have to make their own decisions about which, but he would prefer them to pick the less valuable ones, or those for which there were multiple copies, in case they were lost—and bring them to Bamako. They should avoid traveling back together, since if one of them was caught, they could lose everything. Each agent should also have a cover story in case he was challenged. (Alkadi’s was that he had asked for a leave of absence from the institute to visit his brother, who was still living in Timbuktu.) Finally, Maiga said, they must not tell anyone, not even their closest relations, where they were going or what they were planning to do there.
“I know that the people of Timbuktu and Gao have a mouth,” he said, “but I want you to close yours.”
The director had no money for the mission since his funding was still blocked, so he paid for their journey from his own resources. He drove them to the bank up the road and withdrew a substantial sum, handing 100,000 West African francs ($170) to each agent. Then he told them to go home and pack.
At three p.m. the following day, the agents carried their bags to the Sogolon roundabout, with its giant sculpture of a water buffalo, and boarded a bus bound for Mopti.
TRAVELING IN MALI was hard in the calmest of times. The vehicles were slow, their springs broken, the seats uncomfortable and the tires dangerously bald, and even though bush mechanics worked miracles, breakdowns dogged almost every journey. There were only 3,400 miles of tarmac in a country twice the size of France, and trucks and vans competed on them with speeding cars, overladen donkey carts, pedestrians, and cyclists, dodging broken-down buses and the corpses of animals. Despite the country’s lack of roads, a Malian was almost seven times as likely to die in a car accident as a Briton, and a little over twice as likely as an American.
The stress of the journey was made worse by the agents’ mission. To enter jihadist territory was risky enough; how much worse it was to be traveling with illicit intent, no matter how noble, that could lead to imprisonment, amputation, or death. On the way north, the men examined the checkpoints they would have to cross with their cargo on the way south. At Douentza, where their route left the tarmac, they saw their first jihadists. “They were everywhere,” Alkadi recalled. There were additional checkpoints a hundred miles north, at Bambara Maounde, and just south of the river. At each stop they had to show their ID cards and answer the jihadists’ questions. Who are you? Where are you going? What’s your business?
By the time they reached the Niger ferry crossing opposite Koriume, they had been traveling for thirty-six hours. It was dusk, and they were not allowed to enter Timbuktu after dark, so they prepared to bed down in the open, on the south bank of the great silvery river. They weren’t alone: Bouya, a nervy character with a high-pitched laugh, recognized a friend and, despite what Maiga had said, couldn’t stop himself from revealing the secret that had been weighing him down. They were on a mission, he told the friend, and perhaps they would even try to get into one of the Ahmad Baba buildings. The friend was astonished. It would be suicidal to attempt such a thing. Before anyone could stop him, he was making a phone call to discuss it with his brother, who agreed that they must not try to get inside the institute under any circumstances: “If you enter the building, the Islamists are going to kill you,” he warned them.
It wasn’t the advice that worried Alkadi and Sadidi so much as the fact that word of the mission was now out.
The agents pressed on. In the morning they crossed the river and passed through the final checkpoints, at Koriume and at the Total gas station at the entrance to town. Sadidi and Alkadi then went to rest at Alkadi’s house in Abaraju, where his brother was still living, and the next day they went to see a colleague, Aboubacrine Maiga, who lived with his family close to the Sidi Yahya mosque, to tell him they had been sent to bring some manuscripts out of Timbuktu.
It was agreed that Bouya, as the senior man, should now go to see the old caretaker Abba and his grandson Hassini and tell them about the task. Soon after leaving, Bouya called to say he had spoken with them and there was no problem, so Alkadi and Sadidi walked through the sandy alleys to the Rue de Chemnitz. Abba led them to the small yard planted with trees at the back of the building and opened the door to the depository, a white-walled room where the manuscripts, each carefully placed in its own acid-free box, were stored in wooden cabinets. The agents had come prepared with a number of empty ten-kilo rice sacks, and they took the manuscripts out of the boxes and carefully packed them into the bags.
They were all nervous, especially Bouya: “The first day we were enormously afraid because it was our first time,” he recalled. “We were really scared, but what can we do? It was not without risk!” Sadidi had an extra problem: he was allergic to dust, which was everywhere, and he kept breaking out in uncontrollable coughing fits.
They hurried to fill the sacks, then one of them went out into the road to call a porter with a push-push to carry the manuscripts to Aboubacrine Maiga’s house opposite the Sidi Yahya mosque. There they made a list of what they had taken. By Alkadi’s estimate they had around eight hundred documents. They managed to find one steel locker, but that was soon filled—some of the leather-bound volumes were huge, with five hundred or even six hundred pages—so they put the rest in two large rucksacks, then divided up the luggage among themselves. Bouya and Sadidi had a backpack each, while Alkadi took the locker plus two huge manuscripts he could not fit inside.
The plan had been for each agent to travel south separately, but now Alkadi and Sadidi preferred not to let Bouya go alone. “When they saw that Bouya began to give information about the mission, they said if they left him alone, he might give away too much and the mission would fail,” recalled Maiga. Sadidi volunteered to leave first. He would phone when he had made it successfully through the checkpoints; then Alkadi and Bouya could leave together.
Alkadi passed an anxious day waiting for Sadidi’s call. When it finally came, Sadidi said he was in Sevare and that there had been no problem. The only people who wanted to look in his backpack were the Malian gendarmes, but he’d told them he was carrying manuscripts that belonged to the state and they had let him pass. Now Alkadi and Bouya set out. Unlike the MNLA, the jihadists weren’t interested in the baggage, and the two passed through the checkpoints without problems. It was only after Sevare, in government territory, that the passengers were ordered to open all their bags.
“The police were searching the bus everywhere,” recalled Alkadi. “They got everything down and looked through all the material.” He watched as a soldier worked his way toward his luggage, coming at last to the locker full of manuscripts. Before he could open it Alkadi stepped forward with a letter Maiga had written explaining that he was traveling on state business.
“I’m not here to look at your mission,” said the soldier. “I’m here to check the luggage.”
Alkadi had no choice but to show him the locker’s contents. The soldier’s eyes widened. “Ah,” he exclaimed, “it’s manuscripts!”
There was an awkward moment, but Alkadi remained calm, and since he wasn’t carrying anything illegal, the soldier simply closed the steel box. It was okay, he said, they could get back on the bus.
They reached Bamako in the early evening, and Alkadi called Maiga to let him know. The following day he brought the manuscripts to the office above the fish-and-chicken shop and told the director what had happened.
When Haidara heard about the rumors circulating in Timbuktu, he wasn’t happy. “I said, ‘Okay, we are going to change the strategy,’” he recalled. “I told them again how it would work.”
BARELY A WEEK after he had returned from Timbuktu, Alkadi was once again heading north, this time on his own. Sadidi had been ruled out of this second evacuation attempt because of his allergy, while Bouya was a security risk. Maiga had reminded Alkadi not to speak of his mission to anyone else, especially not his family. All the researcher could tell his wife in Segu was that he had to go away again for a few days.
In Mopti he found a 4x4 bound for Timbuktu, which he shared with an assistant mayor and several others. They reached the south bank of the river just before nightfall, but the ferry had stopped for the evening, so they hailed a fishing pirogue, which carried them to the other side, then talked the driver of a Land Rover into taking them the last nine miles to Timbuktu. At the checkpoint by the Total gas station, a young mujahid with a gun, a waistcoat, and a turban in the Afghan style approached the vehicle. Alkadi thought he was a Pakistani.
The assistant mayor was fidgety—what if they found out who he was?—but the young jihadist didn’t even ask for their IDs. His only concern was the elderly woman who was sitting with the men in the back seats.
Alkadi, an educated and devout Muslim, was caught by surprise. She was an old woman, he said. Her son was accompanying her. There was no ban on men and women traveling together in Islam.
“You are lying!” yelled the young fighter. “You deliberately put the woman between you! You have to get out. Get out!”
The passengers hurried to do as the gunman said, and the driver quickly arranged for the woman to swap with a man in the front seat. She was still sitting next to a man—the driver—but the jihadist was satisfied that Salafist protocols had been restored, and the Land Rover was waved on its way.
It was dark by the time Alkadi reached his house in Abaraju. He phoned Aboubacrine to tell him he was back, then went to rest, and the following day they went together to the old building, where they met Abba and Hassini again. They called Maiga from there: the director wanted to explain the new mission personally to the caretaker. That afternoon, they set to the task, which soon became a routine.
Alkadi would leave his house at midday for the duha prayer at a mosque in the market. Then, as the temperature climbed and people went home to eat and rest, he made his way to the Rue de Chemnitz, bringing a dozen or so rice sacks with him. Hassini would let him into the depository. There they worked together, Alkadi taking the boxes off the shelves and passing them one by one to Hassini, who placed them on the table and opened them while Alkadi noted each manuscript’s catalogue number. On the first mission they had noted the titles too, but since Hassini couldn’t read Arabic, they now just took the numbers. They removed the manuscripts from the boxes to save space in the lockers, and Hassini held open each sack while Alkadi carefully filled it. Apart from a few scientific documents he recognized, Alkadi didn’t know exactly what the manuscripts were; he just grabbed what he could.
They worked until four p.m., breaking off as the city began to reawaken, and then Alkadi stayed with Hassini and Abba in their house in the library compound till dusk. When night had fallen, one of them went into the street to hail a push-push, which was brought around to the back entrance and loaded with the sacks. When they were ready to move, Abba would walk up to the main road to check if the coast was clear. On his signal, the men would set off, Hassini walking in front of the porter with the cart, Alkadi behind, as they escorted the documents the half mile to Aboubacrine’s house. They were careful to choose a different push-push every night so that no one became too suspicious, and they took the back lanes as much as possible to avoid jihadist patrols.
On the second day they added an evening shift. It was harder working at night—there were frequent power outages, and Abba had to hold a flashlight—so they couldn’t stick at it too long, but the manuscript were soon piling up in the house opposite the Sidi Yahya mosque.
Aboubacrine then contacted Maiga, who gave them the number of a trader Haidara knew who would bring the manuscripts south. The trader dropped off ten lockers, telling them to fill them and take them to a particular building in the nearby neighborhood of Bellafarandi. Alkadi and Aboubacrine then transferred the documents to the lockers. When each one was full, they fastened it with a padlock at either end and Alkadi pocketed the keys. They wheeled these, one by one, to the trader’s house, no more than two or three a day and at different times, to avoid being noticed. From there the lockers were shipped south on the vehicles that still plied the desert, working the trade route from Timbuktu to Bamako. Even in wartime, the transporters continued to work, since the jihadists wanted the city’s commerce and needed the food imports. According to Maiga, the occupiers trusted the merchant: “He had the confidence of the Islamists, and took the opportunity to get things out without people bothering him,” he said.
The manuscripts made their way south under piles of Timbuktu produce, as well as Coca-Cola and Fanta and other imported goods shipped from Algeria and Mauritania. “Sometimes the trucks took two lockers, sometimes four,” said Haidara. “Sometimes there were two cars and in each car there were five lockers, or three cars with three lockers. That’s how we carried on.” Sometimes one of Haidara’s people would accompany the shipments, but at other times they were on their own, “under God’s protection,” as Alkadi put it.
When the manuscripts reached the Poste de Nyamana, the giant customs checkpoint at the edge of Bamako, the driver or courier would call to tell the librarians they had arrived, and Maiga or Haidara would go to meet them and, if necessary, ease their passage through the bureaucracy. “I took my car to meet them there at the entry to Bamako,” recalled Haidara. “There was often a blockage there and I paid a lot of money. That was a big problem.” The lockers were then taken to the Ahmad Baba office in Kalaban Coura. Sometimes Maiga drove them personally, but if there was a large number coming in, he would hire one of the green-painted Sotrama minibus-taxis that carry commuters all over Bamako.
As the operation progressed, the strain began to get to Alkadi. He became paranoid about the children who played around his house. What if they told someone about his movements? He started to leave before dawn, before the kids were out, waiting in the trader’s house in Bellafarandi until two p.m. before starting the job. He also worried that Aboubacrine lived too close to the market: the road by his house was always busy with traffic and people and patrols. It was impossible to hide the lockers when they moved them to the trader’s house, and people stared. If he was asked, Alkadi told them they just contained market goods, but he worried that the cover story was wearing thin. What if someone asked him to open a locker? “Perhaps they knew we were up to something,” he thought. “Perhaps they would check inside Aboubacrine’s house, then there would be a big problem.”
He told Maiga he believed people were becoming suspicious. The director thought he had a point. “People saw too much back-and-forth, they wondered what was happening,” he recalled. So when they had placed ten full lockers in the trader’s house, Maiga told him he had done enough. Alkadi traveled back in mid-August, reaching Bamako on the 23rd, fifteen days after setting out.
On the first trip the three agents had moved almost a thousand manuscripts. After working hard for a week, with the help of Hassini, Abba, and Aboubacrine, Alkadi had now shifted around eight thousand more. Roughly two-thirds of the collection that had been stored in the old building still remained.
A short time after Alkadi had settled back in Bamako, Maiga called him in again. “Now you have to go and bring them all,” he said.
HAIDARA CAME TO THE OFFICE to see Maiga and Alkadi before the third evacuation. He wanted to speak to Alkadi, to reassure him that he was doing the right thing. “He told me that I shouldn’t be afraid and said it was a job that would be good for us in the long run, but it had to be done as if it was no big deal,” Alkadi remembered. “He encouraged me and calmed me.”
Alkadi’s paranoia was such that he didn’t even tell Aboubacrine about this final trip. He worked only at night, with Abba and Hassini, and faster than ever. The ten-kilogram sacks were too small, he decided, so he brought around twenty hundred-kilo sacks. They loaded these in bulk, sewing them closed when they were full. There was no attempt even to count the manuscripts now; such was the rush, it was all they could do to try to stop the loose pages from getting mixed up. They worked long into the night, until they were exhausted, then brought the sacks by push-push and donkey cart straight to the house in Bellafarandi. There they closed the door, unloaded the manuscripts, and returned with the empty sacks to the depository. In the mornings, Alkadi worked alone at packing the documents into lockers. When one of the steel chests was full, he moved it to another room in the house: the trader would take it from there and place it on the transports. At midday Alkadi went home to rest, heading back to the institute at nightfall to start a new shift.
After ten grueling days, the archive at the institute was empty, and Alkadi felt a world of trouble lifting from his shoulders. Leaving the building for the last time, he bumped into Sadidi, the colleague who had accompanied him on the first trip. His friend was surprised to see him back, unannounced, in Timbuktu. “What are you up to? I thought you were in Bamako!”
Even now, speaking to a friend and fellow agent, Alkadi didn’t drop his guard. He had been sent to Gourma Rharous, he told Sadidi, the next major town downriver, and had gone into the institute to give his regards to Abba. “I’m just passing through,” he said.
Alkadi left Timbuktu in mid-September, having moved the entire collection of around 24,000 documents from the old building.
THE OPERATION had been conducted in great secrecy, but Maiga felt he now had to tell some of his colleagues what had been done. One of these people was the most senior employee left in Timbuktu, Abdoulaye Cissé. When he had taken up his new job, Maiga had entrusted the manuscripts to Cissé, telling him to make sure nothing moved. Two days after the evacuation was complete, Maiga called to say the entire collection from the Rue du Chemnitz had been transferred to Bamako. “We had evacuated all the manuscripts in the old building from under his nose,” Maiga recalled, “and he wasn’t even aware of it!”
Maiga also had to inform the civil servants in the Ministry of Higher Education, which had responsibility for the Ahmad Baba institute. He had been in the job only five months, after all, and now he and Haidara had covertly moved the bulk of the state collection six hundred miles southwest to his new office in Kalaban Coura.
He decided to host a surprise reception, what Haidara described as a “little cocktail,” and invited a select group from the ministry, including the technical adviser with special responsibility for the Ahmad Baba institute, Drissa Diakité, and a handful of his own staff. He left out the minister, as he didn’t want it to be too high-profile an event; they still needed to keep their operations secret.
The men from the ministry were shown into a room filled with the sorts of steel lockers that were used for shipping items all around Mali. “It was clear that they had no idea we had begun something,” recalled Haidara. When Maiga opened the boxes, the men recoiled. “They said, ‘Ah! What is that?’” recalled Maiga. “They were very surprised, very surprised.”
Since the jihadist assault on the tombs of the Timbuktu saints, the ministers had been dreading that something similar would happen to the city’s written heritage. “We were preoccupied with an attack on the manuscripts,” Diakité said, so when the lockers were opened and he saw what they had done, he thought it was “marvelous,” something “salutary.” Questions tumbled out. How had they managed to get them through all the checkpoints? How had they even formed the idea of smuggling them south? Diakité did not question the decision to keep the operation hidden. “It was necessary that this was secret, so they did not inform the authorities,” he said. At the same time, he found the thought of the manuscripts in transit in lockers “frightening,” and knew a lot of work remained to be done. “We had to find the means to stop them from being all concentrated in the same locale, because that was also dangerous for the manuscripts.” The humid climate of Bamako was also a threat. “We had to improve the conditions in which they were being held. There were a lot of question marks.”
Overall, though, the men from the ministry were overjoyed. They spoke of giving medals to Maiga and Haidara. “No, no, no,” said Haidara. What else, then, could they do for him?
“You have the manuscripts,” Haidara said, “but what I ask is that you must not speak about it, because our manuscripts are still there.” He was referring to the private collections, which, he said, made up 85 percent of the total number of documents in the city. Those were still in danger. “Soon we are going to start evacuating them,” he said. “It is not over. So the best present you could give me would be to not talk about it.”
The men from the government agreed.
THERE WERE TWO STRANGE POSTSCRIPTS to the operation to smuggle the Ahmad Baba institute’s manuscripts south. The first was that Maiga was called in by the minister of higher education and berated for what he had done. “Who gave you the order to move the manuscripts?” the minister asked. Maiga explained that in the times they were living through he had decided not to wait for approval, whereupon the minister brusquely told him he must be informed of anything that was done and dismissed him.
“People always think the worst,” said Maiga.
The second consequence was that relations between the librarians began to deteriorate.
At the start of September, Haidara had traveled to Dubai to set out his problems to Juma al-Majid, a veteran Arab philanthropist who ran a center for the preservation of Arabic manuscripts and had funded previous projects in Timbuktu. Haidara explained how they had been forced to move the documents into people’s houses, where they were now kept in poor conditions in wooden or steel trunks, and that the jihadists’ behavior was increasingly threatening. Al-Majid told him not to delay but to shift them from Timbuktu in any way he could. “I will help you immediately,” he said. “You must start working on it from today.” He would send Haidara $30,000 to get him started.
Maiga felt cut out of this transaction. “He told me, ‘Once the money is there, I’ll give you a part that you will use to take out the manuscripts,’” the Ahmad Baba director recalled. “But—these are things that are not good to say—I knew he already had the money. And he had already contacted merchants and traders who had already bought lockers and trunks for manuscripts in Timbuktu. He knew that I had just arrived [in the job], and I had no means, and he played on that.”
Maiga expected to get a financial breakdown of how much Haidara had raised and how much they could spend, and to have a discussion with him about how large a share would be allocated to the Ahmad Baba manuscripts. But Haidara didn’t provide any of this information. “I was shocked for two reasons,” said Maiga. “First, when we started the meetings in my office, we said we were going to manage it together, to the end. But when he had the money, this was not the case. Second, if I had known he had the money, I would not have paid for things out of my own pocket.”
Later, Haidara maintained that he had never promised Maiga any of the money he raised—“We never spoke about it,” he said—and that anyway it was he, not Maiga, whom the government had authorized to evacuate the manuscripts.
By September, the alliance of three powerful librarians who had begun meeting in May had collapsed. Haidara would pursue his evacuation of the privately owned manuscripts without Maiga’s help.
“He pushed me away,” said Maiga.