General Charles F. “Chuck” Wald, the deputy commander of the United States European Command, based in Vaihingen, Germany, on the eastern outskirts of Stuttgart, was a burly ex-college football star from North Dakota with a hard-charging manner that both inspired and intimidated his underlings. After being selected in the fourteenth round of the NFL draft as a wide receiver by the Atlanta Falcons in 1969, Wald had opted instead for a career as a pilot in the Air Force. He had flown or directed combat missions in every U.S. military campaign since the late 1960s, a distinction that had prompted one defense expert to call him “the Zelig of airpower”—referring to the Woody Allen character with a knack for being present at one momentous event after another during the 1920s and 1930s. Wald flew light aircraft into combat over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; and directed aerial raids on Muammar Al Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli in 1986 following a Libyan terrorist attack on a Berlin nightclub that killed two U.S. soldiers. A decade later, at the end of the Bosnian war, he bombed Serb ammunitions depots in Bosnia-Herzegovina from an F-16. He had been the Air Force point man in Afghanistan, overseeing 35,000 men and 350 aircraft in the campaign to destroy the Taliban.
At the time that Wald arrived in Vaihingen, in 2002, responsibility for conducting U.S. military operations in Africa was divided among three Unified Commands, with the European Command in charge of West Africa. (Five years later Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would create the Africa Command, basing it in Stuttgart after no African government would accept a permanent U.S. military presence on its soil, and placing the entire continent under its supervision.) Wald spent much of his time monitoring a worsening crisis in the oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria, where rebel groups and criminals were kidnapping American oil workers and holding them for multimillion-dollar ransoms. Wald also spotted the potential for trouble in what he called the “vast, ungoverned spaces” of the Sahara. Arab racketeers were making tens of millions of dollars a year running cigarettes, drugs, weapons, and illegal immigrants from Mali and Niger to North Africa and across the Mediterranean to Europe. Some smugglers had links to the Islamist rebel groups that had waged a brutal civil war against the Algerian regime in the 1990s in which tens of thousands of civilians had been killed. The nexus of money, weapons, crime, and radical Islam was worrying the Algerians, and the Americans, who passed on intelligence to them and helped them with border surveillance, shared their concern.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the George W. Bush administration’s war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Wald believed that the Sahel region was fertile ground for jihadism. The U.S. military had driven Al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors out of Afghanistan, depriving it of its main safe haven; the Islamist government of Sudan, which had protected bin Laden for five years during the 1990s, had expelled him under U.S. and Saudi pressure in 1996, and made it clear that the terrorist group was no longer welcome there. That left the radicals with reliable refuges only in Yemen, where a weak regime had ceded control of the mountains east of the port of Aden to the jihadis, and the “Wild West” of the Sahara—especially Mali. As a part of the peace deal signed with the Tuareg rebels in 1996, Malian authorities had agreed to draw down their military presence in the region north of Timbuktu, and there was also a tacit understanding that they would not interfere with the Tuaregs’ traditional source of income, the smuggling of contraband across the porous desert borders, often in league with Arab tribesmen. After the Malian army retreated in the mid-1990s, the area became an ever-wilder no-man’s-land, and extremist elements had moved into the vacuum. Mali was a forerunner of other collapsing states such as Syria, where the loss of power of the beleaguered regime of Bashar Al Assad in 2012 and 2013 allowed the radical group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to gain supremacy over a large swath of ungovernable territory.
In early 2003, U.S. intelligence services delivered to Wald a set of grainy photographs taken by a “spy in the sky” satellite. The images showed dozens of armed men lined up in neat rows at a desert training camp north of Timbuktu. In a safe room in the headquarters of the European Command—a leafy complex of beige-concrete buildings, built for the Nazi war machine in 1936, and occupied by the United States Third Army after World War II—Wald held the photos up to the light. He scrutinized the elements: semiautomatics, a remote desert setting, men who appeared to be Islamist fighters, some of them on horseback. The images looked almost exactly like the surveillance photos that he had often analyzed of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. It’s a military formation, he thought. It looks like terrorist training. The photos were too grainy to make out individual faces. But intercepts of satellite phone calls and other intelligence, Wald told me years later, suggested that the commander of the group was the Sahara’s most notorious outlaw, an individual destined to become a leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali: Mokhtar Belmokhtar.
Belmokhtar, thirty, was born and grew up in Ghardaïa, a dusty town of high unemployment and smoldering antigovernment resentments, in the M’Zab Valley in the Algerian Sahara, 370 miles south of Algiers. “It’s too bad that there’s no ocean here,” runs a typical youthful lament in the valley. “Then we could have fled this country where there is no place for us.” During his adolescence, many young men in Ghardaïa were being drawn to Salafism, and Belmokhtar became one of its most zealous devotees. Stirred in secondary school by the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he listened ardently to cassettes and read the sermons of a Palestinian idealogue, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a mentor of Osama bin Laden and cofounder of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Azzam died in a car bomb explosion in Peshawar in 1989, a decisive event in young Belmokhtar’s life. One year later, Belmokhtar traveled to Mecca for the umrah, a secondary pilgrimage typically carried out during Ramadan. The following year, he and three other teenagers from Ghardaïa made their way to Afghanistan to join the jihad. They were motivated, in part, by a desire to avenge Azzam’s murder, though it was never clear who the culprits had been; the suspects ranged from the Mossad, Israel’s covert operations and counterterrorism unit, to rivals within the recently formed Al Qaeda. The Soviet Union had withdrawn from Afghanistan in February 1989. Belmokhtar fell in with Hezb-i-Islami, an Islamist guerrilla group fighting to bring down a secular regime in Kabul. Comprised of thousands of international recruits, the Islamist rebels were based in the tribal areas of Pakistan and were led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a virulently anti-Western mujahideen leader to whom the Central Intelligence Agency had funneled at least $600 million to wage war against the Soviets during the 1980s.
Later Belmokhtar found his way to an Al Qaeda camp in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan, about a hundred miles from Kabul, and there forged connections with radical Islamists from across the Middle East. They included Abu Qatada, a Bethlehem-born jihadi who would later become known as “Osama bin Laden’s Ambassador man in Europe” and who called for attacks on American citizens “wherever they are.” Another acquaintance was Abu Mohammed Al Maqdisi, a Nablus-born idealogue who would become the spiritual mentor to the murderous commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi—whom Belmokhtar also claimed to have met, briefly, in Jalalabad.
Belmokhtar lost his left eye when explosives he was handling during a training exercise blew up in his face, according to an interview he gave to a jihadi website years later. In late 1992—just before the government of Pakistan, under international pressure for harboring potential terrorists, expelled many foreign mujahideen, or holy warriors—Belmokhtar returned to Algeria. Earlier that year the Algerian military had nullified the election victory of a popular Islamist party called the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), and plunged the country into one of the bloodiest civil wars of the twentieth century. Belmokhtar, whose Islamist views had been hardened by his years in Afghanistan, joined the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA), a brutal militia fighting to overthrow a newly established military regime and replace it with an Islamist state.
By the mid-1990s, according to a 2004 human rights report by the Justice Commission for Algeria, the GIA was engaging in horrific killings of civilians suspected of collaboration with Algerian security forces, or simply for behavior deemed un-Islamic. “The GIA attacked families, young people and imposed taboos,” recalled one survivor near Algiers. “Every other day we discovered bodies, including of young girls. They were sometimes hung to a post or tied up with metal wires, sliced to pieces or beheaded. There seemed to be no limit to horror.” The GIA set up roadbocks, stopped buses, searched for “suspects”—including anyone who had done military service—and executed them on the spot. Soon the GIA gravitated from shootings to bombings of buses, markets, trains, schools, administration buildings, and factories. Large-scale civilian massacres, carried out by both Islamic extremists and the Algerian army, swept the country. “The sound of gunfire and bomb explosions, the screams of the victims, and the flames and smoke of the houses on fire are audible and visible from a distance,” an Amnesty International report noted at the end of 1997, at the height of the killings.
The civil war began to wind down in 1999. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika pardoned both Islamist fighters and government torturers and execution squads. By then, the army and the Islamist rebels had killed 100,000 civilians. “The weaker brethren of the Islamist revolt went home while the hard, unforgiving men emigrated into the deserts and across the Algerian border,” wrote the journalist Robert Fisk in The Independent. A new phase of the jihad was taking shape—one that would target French and American citizens in North Africa, draw fighters from across the Islamic world, seize swaths of lightly patrolled territory, and lay the groundwork for a caliphate in the Sahara. “Belmokhtar inherited a ‘cleansed’ Al Qa’ida qatiba [brigade]—and a new version of Bin Laden’s battle,” Fisk wrote.
Belmokhtar had always been a reluctant participant in some of the GIA’s more cold-blooded crimes. Though he killed Algerian soldiers and customs officers with cool efficiency—the Algerian government sentenced him to death twice in absentia for these murders—he had also argued that murdering noncombatants tarnished the jihadis’ image and cost them popular support. Around 1998, while the GIA was still carrying out near-daily massacres in the suburbs of Algiers, Belmokhtar quit the group and retreated to Tamanrasset, an oasis town in the Ahaggar Mountains north of the Mali-Algeria border, and the principal city of the Algerian Tuareg tribe.
Here, Belmokhtar moved from Islamic jihad to self-enrichment. Ingratiating himself with elders in Arab and Tuareg villages on both sides of the border—the two ethnic groups maintained an uneasy coexistence in the Sahara—the former mujahid spread around cash and livestock, took four Tuareg and Arab brides, including pubescent girls, established deep roots in the communities, and became the dominant player in the smuggling of tobacco across West and North Africa. Belmokhtar traded in both counterfeits produced in China and Vietnam and genuine Western brands, which typically entered West Africa from the United States and Europe through Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Guinea, and reached Mali by road or by boat along the Niger. Belmokhtar and his colleagues charged a tax for safe passage of the cigarettes or smuggled the product themselves through the Sahara along established salt-trading routes by SUVs, trucks, and motorcycles. The final destinations were Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, which together consume nearly half of Africa’s cigarettes, much of them purchased on the black market.
Belmokhtar was, by all accounts, a cunning, energetic, and resourceful gangster. Within a couple of years, by building an entrenched network of support through the desert, and intimidating would-be competitors, he gained so great a share of the trans-Saharan contraband business that he became known in the region as “Mr. Marlboro.” (Others called him “One Eye.”) His success moving cigarettes illegally across borders caught the attention of a breakaway Islamist movement in Algeria, the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which had split from the GIA in the waning days of the civil conflict and declared war against Algeria’s secular regime. The group’s leaders, hidden in the mountains, recruited Belmokhtar in 1998 and named him “emir” of its southwest Saharan zone. His main responsibility was smuggling weapons and ammunition to GSPC cadres. In 2002, Algeria’s intelligence service claimed to have evidence that the group was seeking ties to international terror networks, and that it had the official sanction of Osama bin Laden.
Other violent figures, who would eventually join Belmokhtar in forming the leadership of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, were showing up on the Americans’ radar screen. One was Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, born in December 1965 to a penniless family of Bedouins in a tented camp outside Zaouia El-Abidia, an oasis town with a single paved street in the Algerian Sahara. As a boy, Abou Zeid (born Abed Hamamou) had known only poverty, desperation, and ridicule. His father, an itinerant laborer, moved the family to Bougaa, set on a windswept four-thousand-foot-high plateau in the northeast corner of the country, 190 miles east of Algiers, where he found work on a farm. Later the family picked up stakes again and settled in Sétif, another high-altitude town, infamous for the slaughter of 104 pieds-noirs—European settlers in Algeria—by Algerian freedom fighters at the end of World War II, and the subsequent massacre of thousands of civilians by French colonial forces in retaliation. In this landscape of snow-covered plains and frigid winters, he was mercilessly teased at school because of his dark skin, his short stature, and a case of rickets—a deficiency of vitamin D that weakens the bone structure and causes stooped posture and bowleggedness. He dropped out of secondary school, and shortly after that, his father, again chasing work, moved the family back south to Zaouia El-Abidia, where many of the 22,000 inhabitants scratched out a living cultivating date palm trees.
The boy and his family lived in a modest house of dried mud brick on a sandy alley in the poorest quarter of the town, with an inscription on the iron front door that read, “Dar Es Salaam,” or “House of Peace” in Arabic. “It was Abed who painted that by his own hand,” his mother recalled to a visiting journalist years later. The teenager worked on a farm, then became a mason—a job that provided him with a nickname, “Mouallem,” or “Teacher,” because knowing the craft of masonry was considered a form of scholarship in that corner of Algeria.
He swiftly moved from construction to contraband. In the early 1980s Abou Zeid tapped into Saharan smuggling networks and brought bulk quantities of tea, electronics, and cigarettes from Libya across the poorly patrolled border into Algeria, selling them on the black market in Zaouia El-Abidia. But Abou Zeid was no Belmokhtar. Arrested for the first time for smuggling by the Algerian gendarmerie in 1984, he shuttled in and out of jail cells during his twenties, where the mistreatment and bullying he had suffered as a teenager continued. “He was manhandled [by the police] many times,” a member of the Algerian police told a Paris Match reporter for a 2010 profile. Mohamed Mokeddem, the director of the Algiers newspaper Ennahar and an expert on Sahel Terrorism, declared that “His hatred of the Algerian government became deeply anchored in his personality.”
Filled with resentments, destabilized by the death of his father in 1989, Abou Zeid drifted toward radical Islam. “Before [his father died] he had always been very open, he liked to laugh,” said a close friend from Zaouia El-Abidia, where the Bedouin population is well known for their festivals and fondness for drinking palm wine, despite its interdiction by the Koran. Abou Zeid attended clandestine meetings of the Algerian Muslim Brotherhood in Zaouia El-Abidia, smuggling weapons from Libya to Islamist groups, and preparing, say security officials and journalists, for a coming jihad against the Algerian regime. At the beginning of the 1990s, he purchased a small date palm farm just outside the city. “He asked me to prepare semolina for forty people, saying that they were workers at his farm,” his mother remembered. “In fact they were Islamists, but I could not refuse them.”
In 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front seemed on the verge of a landslide victory in Algeria’s legislative elections, prompting the military to annul the second round of voting. Abou Zeid at the time was a member of the Islamic party’s bureau in Touggourt, a large town not far from Zaouia El-Abidia, and he, like many of his comrades in the organization, vowed to take revenge.
Some time afterward, the Algerian army ambushed an armed group of Islamists outside Zaouia El-Abidia, and killed Abou Zeid’s beloved older brother, Bachir. Immediately after the killing, he joined the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, the most violent terrorist band fighting the state, and may have participated in a series of massacres of civilians accused of being collaborators with the Algerian military. In 1998, he joined the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat. Abou Zeid was an ordinary foot soldier, under the command of Amari Saifi, a former Algerian army paratrooper and ex-bodyguard of the Algerian defense minister. The terrorist leader, who went by the nom de guerre El Para, had little respect for his diminutive and frail young charge. “He is ugly and even shorter than [French president Nicolas] Sarkozy,” said El Para in the early 2000s. “I think that he has an [inferiority] complex, and that he’s even a little jealous of me.” But Abou Zeid climbed through the hierarchy and was soon granted rare permission to live with a woman—a sign of his importance within the organization. In 2002, he issued his first fatwa, declaring all young Algerians who completed their compulsory military service to be legitimate targets of GSPC attacks. Abou Zeid would soon earn a reputation as one of the GSPC’s most rabid idealogues—and perhaps its most merciless killer.
In 2003, the paratrooper-turned-jihadi El Para enlisted Abou Zeid in a scheme that would gain notoriety as one of the most audacious criminal operations in the history of the Sahara. Between late February and April, he and his Islamist militia kidnapped thirty-two Western tourists—French, German, Swiss, and Dutch—from a stretch of scenic desert road in southeast Algeria. The terrorists picked off four or five foreigners at a time as they rode motorcycles or four-wheel-drives down the highway—known as “the Graveyard Piste” because of the ancient Tuareg cemeteries that lie along the route—and disappeared with them into the wilderness.
At first El Para, Abou Zeid, and their gang did not announce their crime: a German military reconnaissance plane captured pictures of abandoned vehicles on the desert floor, and other imagery indicating that the tourists had been abducted, divided into two groups, and marched into the desert. One thousand two hundred Algerian soldiers and police joined German counterterrorism forces on a search by camel and helicopter through mountains and canyons. Not long afterward, a letter discovered by a scout under a tree revealed that the GSPC had been behind the abductions.
In May 2003, Algerian Special Forces raided a canyon, killed fifteen kidnappers, and carried seventeen hostages to safety. El Para, whom the French news media would come to call “the bin Laden of the Sahara,” and Abou Zeid escaped the carnage and took the remaining fifteen hostages, fourteen Germans and one Dutchman, on a two-week-long trek south into Mali. The captors forced their female hostages to wear hijabs—Islamic veils—improvised out of handkerchiefs and towels and fed the captives little but porridge mixed in a pail with muddy water. One forty-six-year-old German woman died of heat stroke during the flight through the desert and was buried in the sand. The bedraggled group took refuge in Mali’s Adrar des Ifoghas massif, a wilderness of eroded sandstone and granite hills, ancient riverbeds filled with sand, and boulder-strewn valleys that begins forty miles north of the provincial capital of Kidal. In an early example of what would become regular practice for the region’s jihadis, El Para and his men, including Abou Zeid, sent word to the Malian and German governments that they would free their hostages in exchange for a multimillion-dollar ransom.
The man whom Mali’s president designated as the government’s representative in the hostage negotiations was Iyad Ag Ghali, a prominent Malian Tuareg from Kidal. Like all Tuaregs, Ghali came out of a culture of Sufism—the moderate, mystical form of Islam that had long dominated northern Mali. He was also a skilled fighter, a natural leader, a poet, a songwriter, a spiritual searcher, and a killer. As dangerous as these jihadis were, Ghali would emerge, ironically, as the biggest threat of all to the region’s stability.
His first exposure to violence had come early. Born around 1957 in a nomadic encampment north of Kidal, Ghali was the son of a Tuareg soldier who had sided with the Malian government during a failed 1963 rebellion, when Tuareg secessionists rose up against newly independent Mali to try to establish their own state—Azawad, meaning “the land of pastures.” When Iyad Ag Ghali was about six years old, a rebel commander shot his father in the head and killed him. Ten years later, after a devastating drought struck the north and killed nearly every camel, sheep, and cow in the region, the teenage Ghali fled the country, hitchhiked and walked across the desert for weeks, and ended up in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. He survived, like thousands of other Tuareg exiles, known as ishumar (from the French word chômeur, or unemployed), by doing odd jobs—gardening, carpentry, housepainting, and herding cattle, goats, and sheep.
After a couple of years of this hardscrabble existence, Ghali founded a small Tuareg rebel movement in Tripoli—it consisted of a one-room office, a fax machine, and about thirty members—and began laying plans for a new Tuareg insurgency. Though rebels had killed his own father, Ghali had witnessed the brutality of the Malian military government while growing up in Kidal—the governor carried out summary executions of suspected dissidents in the town square—and his associations with young Tuareg exiles in the cafés of Tamanrasset and Tripoli had heightened his sympathies for the rebel cause. In his early twenties, he underwent training at a military camp in the Libyan Sahara established in the early 1980s by Qaddafi, ostensibly to prepare the Tuareg exiles for another uprising, but primarily to train disposable young fighters for Libya’s military adventures in Africa and the Middle East. Ghali fought in Qaddafi’s Islamic Brigade alongside the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 1982, hunkering down for weeks in bunkers near Sidon as Israeli warplanes bombarded PLO targets. He also joined in a 1987 infantry and tank assault in the Chadian desert against the forces of the dictator Hassan Habré, whom Qaddafi was seeking to depose. The Chadian army surrounded and killed thousands of Qaddafi’s troops, forcing Ghali’s Tuareg unit to flee across the border.
Ghali fell in with a group of Tuareg fighter-musicians in a barracks at Qaddafi’s camp called the Artists’ House. It turned out that he had a flair for poetry, and he soon began writing lyrics for them. The music, similar to that of the great guitarist Ali Farka Touré and also known as “the desert blues,” often consisted of nothing more than two or three chords, call-and-response vocals, a melancholy tone, and a single repetitive, hypnotic phrase. Ghali’s song “Bismillahi,” or “In the Name of God,” would become the unofficial anthem of Azawad, the independent state that many Tuaregs wanted to carve out of northern Mali, stretching from the Niger River north to the Taghaza salt mines, and northeast of Timbuktu to the modern-day border with Mauritania. “In the name of God, we rise up and begin/The revolution in the company of all our brothers,” the first verse proclaimed. “Like true warriors we are going to trample on the enemy/Yes, in the name of God, we rise up and begin.” In his ballad “Pendant Toute Une Nuit,” or “All Night Long,” Ghali declared his rapturous love for an unnamed woman: “My eyes are still lost in the stars/Crushed by a nostalgia that envelops me like a tent/I’m invaded by memories of your soft words/As if you were speaking now beside me.”
In June 1990 Ghali led about one hundred men, armed with ten aging AK-47 rifles, across the Malian border. They attacked remote military camps, surprised the poorly trained Malian troops, achieved several quick victories, captured arms and vehicles, and drew hundreds, then thousands of Tuaregs to their cause. “Tuaregs didn’t go to school, weren’t in the army, and didn’t have any positions in the government,” one rebel commander who fought alongside Ghali explained to me. “We had to return to fight a war so we would be accepted as Malian citizens and have equal rights.”
Experienced in close combat with light weaponry after years of fighting in Qaddafi’s Islamic Brigade, the rebels picked off the government troops with lethal accuracy. They captured the imaginations of many in the West. The French historian Pierre Boilley described the “eternal Saharan mystique” of “a veiled nomad perched on his camel and brandishing his AK-47. . . . These men no longer carried the sword at their side like their fathers but instead waved the ‘Kalach’ . . . the arm of all resistance movements, of dissidence and revolt.”
Each evening the rebels gathered around campfires and listened to warrior-musicians play guitar and sing martial songs written by Ghali and other commanders. The rebel-musicians’ bootleg cassettes were passed around the north, glorifying their combat and drawing more young men into the insurgency.
The rebellion ended with a temporary peace accord in January 1991, and Ghali arrived to a hero’s welcome in Bamako. Mali’s government conceded much of what Ghali and his rebels had asked for—millions of dollars in development money, integration of the fighters into the army and civil service. “He was Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Che Guevara rolled into one,” said Mohammed “Manny” Ansar (the family name means “defenders”), a Tuareg law school graduate from the dunes north of Timbuktu, who first met Ghali in Bamako at the time of the signing ceremony and organized a dinner for him with Tuareg business and student leaders. As a reward for his persuading many Tuaregs to renounce violence, the regime made Ghali a presidential security adviser, and gave him a villa in Bamako and salary to keep the peace. But Ghali never renounced the goal of Tuareg independence, maintained close ties to the rebels, and kept his options open.
At this time Bamako was emerging as a world music capital, and Ghali’s musical connoisseurship continued to develop. Every Sunday he and Manny Ansar—then a development official for a Norwegian charity and aspiring music producer—organized outdoor concerts at a picnic site in the shade of a mango tree by the Niger, just outside Bamako. The concerts featured a small group of Tuareg musicians with whom Ghali had fought in the battlefields of the north, led by a Carlos Santana lookalike named Ibrahim Ag Habib. Habib and his fellow ex-rebels transfixed their growing audiences with songs about heroic assaults on desert strongholds, the power of companionship in the Sahara, and their yearning for a homeland.
Ibrahim Ag Habib, who cited influences ranging from Egyptian pop to Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, called his band “Kel Tinariwen”—“People of the Desert”—which he soon shortened to Tinariwen. In January 2000 Ghali invited Habib and the other Tuareg musicians to perform at a Tuareg folklore festival in the desert north of Kidal. Two thousand nomads gathered in a valley of red sand between mountains and dunes for three days of camel races and indigenous music, much of it filmed for national television. No foreign tourists attended this nomadic gathering, but the event, Ansar would later say, would serve as his inspiration for the three-day concert series that he would call the Festival in the Desert. Ansar and a few fellow Tuareg promoters inaugurated the festival in 2001 with live music and camel racing in the dunes north of Kidal. Iyad Ag Ghali provided security for the event. Two years later, Ansar gained total control of the festival and moved it to Essakane, a traditional meeting place for members of his clan, near Timbuktu, where—thanks to his shrewd marketing and the appearances of famous Western musicians—it began attracting a significant number of visitors from around the world.
But even as he became an aficionado and a promoter of Malian music, Ghali was being drawn into Islamic fundamentalism. During the winter of 2002, four missionaries from the Tablighi Jama’at movement, based in Pakistan, arrived in Kidal and began preaching to the Tuaregs. Founded in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the early twentieth century, Tablighi Jama’at is ostensibly a peaceful sect whose adherents emulate the austere lifestyle of the Prophet Mohammed—sleeping on rough mats on the floor, using twigs to brush their teeth—and spend forty days a year overseas on door-to-door prosletyzing missions. “The Pakistanis are up there converting all the former Tuareg rebels,” Ansar was told by a friend living in northeast Mali. “They’re all becoming devout.” Even Ghali, Ansar learned to his surprise, had begun attending mosque on a regular basis and had expressed keen interest in what these strict Muslims had to say.
In 2002, Ghali studied at the main Tablighi Ja’maat mosque in France, located in the suburb of Saint-Denis, outside Paris. (This was the same suburb where French police would hunt down and kill the Islamic State terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the architect of the November 13, 2015, attacks.) Later that year he visited the movement’s complex of mosques, madrassahs, and residential compounds near Lahore, in eastern Pakistan. Each November, four million people—the largest congregation of Muslims after the hajj—descend upon the complex for the three-day itjema, or gathering, sleeping on mats in a huge mosque, listening to a marathon of sermons, and praying in the streets. Life, he told Ansar upon returning home, “is like a waiting room in an airport when you are in transit,” a brief interlude before the “real journey” begins. “You had better be prepared,” he admonished Ansar, while reclining on pillows and thumbing through a copy of the Hadith.
By 2003, Ghali had begun to frequent a Salafi mosque in Bamako with ties to Tablighi Jama’at. One afternoon, Manny Ansar arrived there to find Ghali seated on a mattress in a small prayer room, a stubbly beard forming on his cheeks. Ansar looked at the cramped cubicles, the dirty mattresses, the bearded acolytes, and politely declined Ghali’s invitation to stay there for a four-day weekend. At this point, Ghali had given up his rich diet of lamb and couscous, his bespoke suits and his embroidered boubous. He seemed to subsist on nothing but milk and dates, and dressed in a white djellaba, a long Middle Eastern robe, and short trousers that ended well above his ankles, the clothes favored by fundamentalist Muslims. He had removed all the photographs and paintings from his house, made his wife wear the hijab, and kept her confined to the home. And he began giving away his prized possessions, handing an expensive Rolex watch to another former Tuareg rebel. Ghali confided to Ansar that he was saying “twice as many prayers” as those required by Islam, because “of all the things I have done that I regret.”
Ansar was mystified by his friend’s devotion but tried to remain open to it.
“You must not lose yourself entirely in religion,” Ansar told him. “You were the one who created these problems for the state and for the society, so you have to stay in charge, to maintain the peace.”
Ghali waved him off.
“He began to lose his friends, his acquaintances, and he became solitary. He entered a different world,” Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, a Tuareg former rebel and a singer-guitarist in Tinariwen, told me many years later.
“You know the Festival in the Desert is not something constructive. It won’t speak well for you before God after you are dead,” Ghali lectured Ansar. “You have to leave it behind, and consecrate yourself to God.” Ghali thrust into his hands a book written by a Salafi scholar about the proper way to pray. “Manny, you have to read this and respect it, and put into practice what you find,” he said. “You have to give yourself over to God, because you are a Muslim.”
“Leave me alone for five more years,” Ansar said. “Then I’ll stop everything and follow your advice.”
“No, no, that’s too late,” Ghali warned. “You don’t know if you’re going to die today.”
It was during this period of Iyad Ag Ghali’s religious transformation that El Para retreated with his hostages to the low-lying Adrar des Ifoghas massif of northern Mali. These were the same strongholds where Ghali had grazed herds of goats and cattle as a boy, where he had encamped as a Tuareg rebel in 1990, and near where he had held his 2000 Tuareg music festival, the precursor to the Festival in the Desert. “Iyad approached the German ambassador, and said, ‘I have the ability to make contact with the jihadis,’ ” recalled a former comrade. One of Ghali’s relatives, an Islamic scholar and imam in northeastern Mali, had become one of the first Tuaregs to join the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, and he might well have facilitated the contact between Ghali and the radicals—including the ringleader, El Para, the rickets-blighted Abou Zeid, and the one-eyed Belmokhtar, the last of whom did not participate in the kidnapping but, a consummate businessman, became involved in the ransom talks.
Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Touré, named Ghali the government’s intermediary with the jihadis, and, the comrade recalls, “The Germans gave him the vehicle to carry out the mission. Iyad found the kidnappers in the mountains, and they had a long parley.” Shortly after that encounter, German diplomats carried three suitcases filled with five million euros cash on a military plane to Bamako to deliver to the kidnappers. Ghali loaded the suitcases into a Land Cruiser and drove back to the kidnappers’ Saharan sanctuary. There, El Para and his men counted the money on a blanket in the sand. Ghali earned a new Land Cruiser for brokering the deal—and the trust of three of the region’s most fanatical jihadis. The hostages were released on August 17, 2003.
American officials were alarmed and outraged by the German government’s capitulation to El Para’s ransom demand. They believed that it had established a dangerous precedent. The Germans tried to keep the payment quiet, but, said Vicki Huddleston, the U.S. ambassador to Mali between 2002 and 2005, “everybody knew about it as soon as it happened.” Reports circulated that the GSPC had spent the money on weapons in Mauritanian gun bazaars, and on recruiting fighters for jihad.