By 2007 the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, the Islamic extremist organization that had been formed a decade earlier from the remnants of Algerian rebel groups, and that had announced itself by kidnapping dozens of European tourists in the Sahara in 2003, was evolving into one of the best financed and most lethal terrorist organizations in the world. At the end of 2004, the GSPC had acquired an ambitious new emir, Abdelmalek Droukdel, a thirty-four-year-old Algerian from the agricultural town of Meftah, fifteen miles south of Algiers, who had established his jihadi credentials as a holy warrior in Afghanistan, and who sought alliances with the most violent figures in the international jihadi network. One to whom he reached out was Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born commander of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then fighting a guerrilla war against the U.S. military in Iraq, and blowing up Iraqi Shi’ite Muslims with the objective of inciting a civil war. Droukdel tried to enlist the homicidal Al Zarqawi in a plot to kidnap French civilians and trade them for El Para, but the plan never got off the ground. When a U.S. drone killed Al Zarqawi, Droukdel vowed revenge on a jihadi website: “O infidels and apostates, your joy will be brief and you will cry for a long time . . . we are all Zarqawi.”
On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 atttacks, in 2006, bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, announced the formal merger of Al Qaeda and the GSPC. Exactly three months later, the GSPC bombed and fired on a convoy near Algiers carrying employees of Brown & Root-Condor, a joint venture of the U.S. Halliburton Group and Sonatrach, the Algerian state-owned oil company. The company was expanding military bases in southern Algeria. An Algerian driver was killed, and nine workers, including an American and four Britons, were wounded.
The Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in January 2007. AQIM declared that its primary goal was bringing down the Algerian regime and replacing it with an Islamic state, and Al Zawahiri proclaimed that the organization would also become “a bone in the throat of American and French crusaders.” Almost immediately AQIM unleashed a series of devastating attacks in the Sahel. Terrorists blew up the front of the Algerian prime minister’s house and a police headquarters in Algiers, killing twenty-three people and injuring more than 160, and car-bombed the offices of the United Nations, also in Algiers, killing sixty. Among the dead were U.N. staffers from Denmark, Senegal, and the Philippines.
The leaders of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operated from villages hidden deep in the mountains of Kabylie, a hundred miles east of Algiers, largely beyond the reach of Algeria’s security forces. Under Droukdel’s command, the group developed a tightly hierarchical structure. Two leadership committees, the fifteen-member Council of Notables, led by Droukdel, and a fourteen-member Shura Council, led by Abdu Oubeida Al Annabi, another veteran of the Afghan jihad, determined targets and priorities, established links with other terrorist groups around the world, and maintained a public presence through audio speeches, videos, and website communiqués. The great majority of these men were mujahideen who had earned their stripes with the GIA during the Algerian civil war and with the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat, AQIM’s predecessor, in the early 2000s. Some had received training with Al Qaeda in Pakistan or Afghanistan; nearly all were kidnappers, drug smugglers, and murderers. These two command structures presided over six committees—political, judicial, medical, military, finance, and foreign relations—and divided their territory of operations into two zones, the “Central Emirate,” including northern Algeria and Tunisia; and the “Sahara Emirate,” including northern Mali, southern Algeria, Niger, and Libya.
Droukdel and his fellow commanders in the Kabylie identified northern Mali—with its weak security forces, vast swath of desert, and growing presence of Western tourists and development workers—as both a vital source of revenue from drug trafficking and kidnappings, and a sanctuary for its fighters. The jihadi organization subdivided northern Mali into two zones, administered by rival emirs. Abdelhamid Abou Zeid controlled the territory around Kidal. The region belonging to Mokhtar Belmokhtar lay north of Timbuktu. Each led a qatiba, or brigade, of 150 to 200 fighters. Abou Zeid had named his unit the “Tarek Ibn Ziyad Brigade,” after the Moorish general who conquered Spain in the eighth century. Belmokhtar called his brigade “Al Moulathamine,” or “The Masked Ones.”
Largely autonomous but expected to produce large sums of money for AQIM, the Al Qaeda militiamen moved through the desert in all-terrain vehicles, oriented themselves with GPS systems, and picked up food, ammunition, fuel, batteries, and even replacement vehicles from cachés buried in the sand. A home video made by a fighter of the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Brigade, captured in 2010 after a shootout with Algerian security forces, showed the men sleeping in caves, making their own clothes on manual sewing machines, repairing their own vehicles, and subsisting on water from the region’s handful of streams and an unvarying diet of roots and lizards.
Abou Zeid was an austere figure, a brutal executioner, wholly committed to Islamist ideology. “There is a commercial aspect to what he does but it is mainly about jihad,” one Western terrorism expert in Bamako told Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor. Belmokhtar was “a businessman with radical tendencies” who operated according to his own code: he viewed soldiers, customs agents, and other government agents as fair game in his holy war, but he usually refrained from killing civilians. The two men competed bitterly for the attentions of their bosses in the Algerian mountains—but their rivalry was good for Al Qaeda’s balance sheet. It fueled a wave of abductions of Westerners for ransom that would, over the next four years, contribute as much as $116 million to AQIM’s coffers.
In April 2008 AQIM gunmen seized two Austrian tourists in Tunisia’s southeastern Sahara, the first abduction of Westerners by jihadis in the desert since 2003. Al Qaeda released those hostages after 252 days of captivity when Austria reportedly paid a $6.4 million ransom. The wave of kidnappings accelerated. In December 2008, Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s brigade intercepted a vehicle carrying two Canadian diplomats on a road outside Niamey, Niger, shoved them into a pickup truck, drove them hundreds of miles through the Sahara, and held them in a series of desolate jihadi camps. A month after that abduction, Abou Zeid’s commandos ambushed three vehicles bringing tourists to Mali from a Tuareg music-and-culture festival in Niger. The gunmen grabbed four middle-aged and elderly European hostages and carried them off to another desert encampment. That June, in a change of tactics, two Al Qaeda gunmen shot dead Christopher Leggett, a thirty-nine-year-old American English teacher, in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. Al Jazeera released a statement from AQIM’s spokesperson saying that Leggett had been executed “for his Christianizing activities.”
Soon it was back to kidnapping. In November 2009, Al Qaeda commandos attacked a convoy on the main highway through Mauritania, and seized three Spanish aid workers. Two weeks later kidnappers under Abou Zeid’s command grabbed a French aid worker from his hotel room in Ménaka, a town in eastern Mali. And days later, in a familiar modus operandi, the Islamists seized a vacationing Italian couple from their vehicle on another desolate road in Mauritania. The kidnapping, an AQIM spokesman said, was in revenge for “the crimes [of the Silvio] Berlusconi government [of Italy against] the right of Islam and Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Abou Zeid struck again in the spring of 2010, with the spectacular abductions of four French workers for Areva at a uranium plant in northern Niger, and the seizure of a seventy-eight-year-old retired French engineer, Michel Germaneau, also in northern Niger, where he was working for a charity organization.
Robert Fowler, one of the two kidnapped Canadians, who was serving as United Nations special envoy to Niger at the time of his abduction, was one of the few Westerners to get a sustained look at Mokhtar Belmokhtar. The AQIM emir appeared periodically at the desert camps where he and his colleague were being held. “He was relatively slight, with a heavily weathered and deeply lined face and curly black hair,” wrote Fowler, who had suffered a compression fracture in a vertebra as a result of his multi-day journey through the desert immediately after his abduction. Fowler described Belmokhtar as a “revered leader” who exuded a sinister magnetism. “He had thin lips set in a straight line, and his mouth twisted from time to time into a ghost of a cold, almost wry smile. His most distinguishing feature was a deep almost vertical scar that began above the middle of his right eyebrow, crossed his right eyelid, and continued across his right cheek, disappearing into his moustache.” Belmokhtar’s crew was sustained by a fanaticism that impressed Fowler. “They would sit chanting in the full Sahara sun for hour after hour,” he observed. “They seemed to have no trouble recruiting. The youngest among them was seven . . . and the voices of three of the others had yet to break. Parents, we were proudly informed, brought them their sons as ‘gifts to God.’ ”
Fowler also described one interaction that set off in sharp relief the different personalities of Belmokhtar and his jihadi rival in northern Mali: Abou Zeid. On April 21, 2009, the Canadian government paid a mere 700,000 euros, then worth about $1 million, for Fowler’s and his fellow Canadian diplomat’s release—a deal negotiated by Belmokhtar himself, to the consternation of his superiors. Fowler was driven to a rendezvous point in the desert just as Abou Zeid’s men arrived with two female Western hostages. Both had been seized after the music festival in Niger. After five months of fear, hunger, ovenlike heat, stultifying boredom, and brutal mistreatment by Abou Zeid and his men, both women suffered from dysentery, and the arm of one had swollen and turned necrotic from a scorpion bite. Their governments had sent them medicine during the negotiation process, but Abou Zeid had withheld it from them. “I recoiled with horror at the sight of those small, troubled white faces, twisted with pain,” Fowler recalled. Belmokhtar inspected the women and, with a “thunderous look on his face,” gave them dysentery pills from a medical kit. Abou Zeid’s callous reputation solidified seven months later. The British government, following a long-standing policy, refused to meet his brigade’s demands for the release of sixty-two-year-old plumbing contractor Edwin Dyer: a multimillion-dollar ransom and the release from a British prison of Abu Qatada, the radical Jordanian cleric whom Belmokhtar had known since the Afghanistan jihad of the 1980s. In June 2009, Abou Zeid beheaded the Briton. Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned Dyer’s “barbaric” murder, and avowed that “it strengthens our determination never to concede to the demands of terrorists, nor pay ransoms.”
Other European governments did not display the same resolve. Understandably unwilling to see their citizens subjected to brutal treatment and possible execution, and disregarding U.S. and British government admonitions that the ransom payments were only fueling Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s recruitment efforts and arms purchases, they turned over tens of millions of dollars to the kidnappers and pressured the Malian government as well to make painful concessions. The jihadis released one Spanish aid worker in March 2010 and her two male compatriots five months later, in exchange for a total ransom paid by the Spanish government that has been estimated as high as $12.7 million; they also freed the Italian couple north of Gao after four months, in a trade for four radical Islamists held in Malian prisons.
Belmokhtar and Abou Zeid supplemented the ransoms they received from European governments with growing profits from international drug trafficking. They had started in that business in the early 2000s, employing Tuareg and Arab couriers to carry cocaine overland through Mali from Equatorial Guinea, a narco-state on the Atlantic Coast controlled by Colombian drug traffickers. By the latter part of the decade, the drug cartels, with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb intermediaries, were shipping huge quantities of cocaine by air through the Malian Sahara. In 2009 nomads discovered the charred carcass of a Boeing 727-200 in the Sahara north of Kidal. It had offloaded as many as ten tons of cocaine, according to a United Nations intelligence report, and, while attempting to take off, had become stuck in the sand. The crew had abandoned the plane and set it on fire to cover their tracks. Recovered flight logs revealed that the plane had made repeated flights between Colombia and Mali, suggesting that a vast and lucrative drug trafficking network existed between the two countries. With their coffers full of cash, their numbers growing, and their logistical capabilities improving, the terrorist group, U.S. officials believed, would soon become capable of attacking Western embassies in the region, and exporting their terror overseas.
In 2005 the Pentagon had launched the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative, a six-year, $500-million program aimed at strengthening the armies of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, and a dozen other northern African nations. Special Forces commandos and Navy SEALs were rotated in to instruct hundreds of Malian soldiers and officers in basic military tactics, from assembling weapons to first aid, to patrolling the desert on foot and in vehicles. The Americans ran trainees through six-week courses conducted three or four times a year near bases in Mopti, Bamako, Gao, and Timbuktu. The army, the trainers recognized immediately, was in desperate shape. The soldiers’ rifles, mostly AK-47s from the former Eastern bloc and China, had broken stocks, clips, and slings. Ammunition was decades old and stored in dampness or extreme heat. Troops showed up for weapons training without a single bullet in their clips. Flying in by helicopter to a Malian military base in the far north to observe the training in 2009, Marshall Mantiply, the U.S. defense attaché, noted the soldiers’ mismatched uniforms, cracked boots, and headgear ranging from turbans to baseball caps. The men looked “unsoldierly,” he thought. The recruitment of rank-and-file troops “was attracting the dregs of the society—all the problem children, failures in school, delinquents, and criminals,” one Malian presidential adviser acknowledged to me several years later. Most of these Malian recruits had grown up in extreme poverty, and they lacked even the most basic skills for functioning on the battlefield. Mantiply observed one war zone simulation exercise that called for soldiers to replace a military truck driver who had been “shot and killed” in an ambush. The troops refused to participate; not a single one of them, it turned out, knew how to drive.
It was not the first time that the Malian army had proven itself an untrustworthy partner in the field. During their pursuit of the Algerian terrorist leader known as El Para through the desert near Mauritania back in 2004, a U.S.-trained Malian brigade had been closing in on his hideout when El Para and his men suddenly broke camp and escaped across the border into Niger. Somebody inside the brigade, the U.S. learned, had tipped off the jihadi commander that the soldiers were getting close. At the time, General Chuck Wald, the deputy commander of the European Command, had vowed angrily that he would “never” work with the Malian armed forces again. Colonel Didier Dacko, a U.S.-trained brigade commander who would become the commander in chief of the Malian military, would admit: “Esprit de corps did not exist.”
Adding to the frustration and sense of drift, the U.S. government was locked into an acrimonious debate about how best to train the Malian troops. Vicki Huddleston was now working out of the Pentagon as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa, overseeing the counterterrorism campaign against the jihadis in the Sahara. Initially opposing Wald when she had been ambassador, Huddleston had shifted her position radically as terrorism grew in the region. She now believed that the objective of the U.S. training mission should be nothing less than the “termination of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” She urged the new ambassador to Mali, Gillian Milovanovic, who arrived in the country in the fall of 2008 and who had significant say over how the training program should be run, to create a quick reaction force of elite Malian troops to destroy nests of Al Qaeda militants.
Milovanovic thought that Huddleston’s goal was “ludicrous,” she would say half a decade later. It would take years to build Malian SWAT teams from scratch, she argued with Huddleston in meetings at the Pentagon. Even the army’s most elite units, known as ETIAs, were in sorry shape. Milovanovic noted in a confidential cable that a U.S. Army captain had introduced her to “one, rather unimpressive soldier, an older, rail thin man with a scraggly beard and bloodshot eyes who had been lounging against a motorbike in a dirty T-shirt inside a warehouse. [The captain] explained that in spite of appearances, this was one of ETIA’s best men, noting that he had been one of the survivors of a July 4 ambush of a Malian Army patrol by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”
Milovanovic argued that the army should establish a presence only on well-traveled desert roads and limit itself to hunting down Al Qaeda’s weapons and fuel caches. “We won’t train the guys to look for Al Qaeda in little Toyota trucks and get ambushed,” she said. Huddleston believed it was a tepid approach that was guaranteed to fail.
But in Milovanovic’s view, the Pentagon brass was unwilling to put its money where its mouth was. Six months after arriving in Bamako, Milovanovic flew to Washington to attend her first meetings at the Pentagon, and was “stunned,” she recounted, by the discrepancy between the amount of money the Defense Department claimed to be spending on Mali and what she had seen in the field. “It was a huge canard,” she said. Tens of millions of dollars went to cover the transport and housing of U.S. trainers, but were misleadingly counted on the balance sheet as direct aid to the Malian military. Equipment was constantly promised but rarely delivered.
Huddleston shot down a proposal by Milovanovic and her defense attaché to provide the poorly equipped Malian air force with a pair of Cessna Caravans—durable turboprops that can be used to transport troops, bomb enemy positions, and conduct aerial surveillance. Huddleston believed that the Malian air force would allow the airplanes to fall apart or use them to attack Tuareg separatists—“their own people”—instead of their intended targets, the jihadis. That left the air force with a couple of Soviet-era MiG-21 fighter jets that hadn’t been off the ground in years, two 1960s Navy Cessnas that barely stayed in the air on the cannibalized parts of a third plane, and four eight-seat Mi-24 helicopter gunships, or Hinds, that had been grounded after a Ukrainian pilot was shot dead in action against Tuareg rebels.
Between 2008 and 2010, a period of alarming growth for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Malian armed forces received from the United States a single shipment of military hardware: thirty armored trucks. The trucks lacked communications gear, and months went by before the Pentagon bothered to send technicians to install the equipment. The radios rapidly drained the truck batteries, making them useless for long-range desert deployments. The trainers finally placed tags on the dashboards in Bambara, the main language of southern Mali, and French.
“Don’t turn the radio on,” they read.
By contrast, the French government, which had once shrugged off the jihadis’ growing presence in the Sahel, had, by late 2009, became far more aggressive against them. AQIM had ambushed and murdered four French tourists, including three members of the same family, during a roadside picnic in Mauritania in December 2007—prompting the cancellation the next year of the annual Paris–Dakar motor rally. The group injured a Frenchwoman in a gun attack on the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott, in February 2008, and killed a French engineer, along with eleven Algerian civilians, in the explosion of two booby-trapped cars in Lakhdaria, Algeria, that June. In August 2009, Abdelmalek Droukdel, the Algeria-based leader of the group, denounced France as the “mother of all evils”; days later, an AQIM terrorist detonated a suicide bomb in front of the French embassy in Nouakchott, killing himself and injuring three passersby, including two embassy staffers. “The French realized AQIM was a growing danger,” Vicki Huddleston told me. “They considered it the biggest foreign terrorist threat that France faced.”
Having lost all confidence in the abilities of the Malian army, France shifted its focus to conducting joint counterterrorism operations with the better-trained Mauritanian military. On July 22, 2010, French and Mauritanian Special Forces flew out of Nouakchott, crossed 1,100 miles of desert, and attacked an AQIM camp in Tigharghar, in Mali’s Adrar des Ifoghas massif, north of Kidal, where, French intelligence indicated, the septugenarian aid worker Michel Germaneau was being held prisoner. The commandos killed six Al Qaeda militants but failed to rescue Germaneau, who may have been moved from the camp just a few hours before the raid. In retaliation, Abou Zeid ordered his beheading—and may have carried it out himself. “As a quick response to the despicable French act, we confirm that we have killed hostage Germaneau in revenge for our six brothers who were killed in the treacherous operation,” Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s leader in Algeria said in a message broadcast on Al Jazeera television. “Sarkozy has [not only] failed to free his compatriot in this failed operation, but he opened the doors of hell for himself and his people.” The Barack Obama administration, unhappy about a military coup that had unseated the elected Mauritanian government two years earlier, was lukewarm about the joint operation. “So by 2010 the United States and France had reversed their roles,” recalled Huddleston. “The French were being far more proactive in their pursuit of Al Qaeda.”
U.S. officials believed that Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Touré, remained oblivious to both the jihadis’ growing strength and his own army’s rot. After Malians voted him back to the presidency in 2002, corruption in the military ranks had deepened. Senior officers rose in rank because of connections rather than merit. Military commanders in the north were suspected of colluding with Al Qaeda in the drug trade. ATT, as he was known, often seemed to pretend that the radical Islamists didn’t exist. The jihadis didn’t pursue the Malian army—as long as they were left alone to smuggle cocaine and kidnap the occasional Westerner. “The [government’s] attitude was, ‘it was best not to poke the hornet’s nest,’ ” Defense Attaché Marshall Mantiply told me. “Why send the troops out on suicide missions?”
Ambassador Gillian Milovanovic met Touré two times in June 2009 at the presidential palace, a sprawling whitewashed villa perched atop an extinct volcano. Her exasperation mounting, Milovanovic warned him that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s use of northern Mali as a safe haven and the killing of the British hostage Edwin Dyer were “rapidly tarnishing” the country’s image. “Do something,” she urged him. Touré made Milovanovic a firm promise to go after Al Qaeda—as long as the United States delivered more military equipment and logistical support. Milovanovic left the meeting feeling that Touré had at last seemed to understand the danger facing his country, she cabled Washington, but others expressed their doubts. “The level of inaction at the presidency was akin to firefighters deciding to sleep through alarm bells at the firehouse,” one high-ranking Malian official reported to the U.S. embassy.
As AQIM continued to gain strength in northern Mali, Iyad Ag Ghali was, as U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats had feared, making a turn toward jihad. After serving as a hostage negotiator, diplomat without portfolio, and presidential security adviser, Ghali had tilted back toward violence in 2006, when he had briefly joined forces with a perennial Tuareg troublemaker in Kidal, who was angry about being passed over for a military promotion. The pair had raised a rebel force, driven out government troops, and captured Kidal. Then Ghali crossed back to the government side and helped the president obtain the release of dozens of Malian soldiers held by the rebels.
Then, in late 2008 Ghali unexpectedly announced that he was leaving Mali. He had had enough of politics and Tuareg rebellion, he told friends, rivals, and Western diplomats, and had decided to accept a low-level diplomatic posting in the Malian consulate in Jeddah, the largest port on the Red Sea, and the second largest city in Saudi Arabia after the capital, Riyadh. “I want to be near the Great Mosque of Mecca, where I can pray five times a day,” he explained to the music impresario Manny Ansar, who worried that the assignment in Saudi Arabia might push Ghali over the edge.
Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University, the fundamentalists’ nerve center, has been an incubator for some of the most virulent strains of Wahhabism. Osama bin Laden studied business administration there and received religious instruction from Mohammed Qatub, the brother of the Islamist revivalist Sayud Qatub, who established the ideological underpinnings of violent jihad against the West. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the Palestinian Sunni theologian whose sermons on cassette had enthralled the aspiring young jihadi Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was a lecturer there before he recruited committed young Islamists to fight a holy war in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, and founded Al Qaeda with bin Laden. Ghali escaped the drudgery of his sweltering office on a back street in Jeddah to seek out Wahhabi radicals, possibly at the university and at some of the city’s 1,300 mosques. Saudi intelligence kept a close eye on him. In August 2009, a Saudi militant with links to Al Qaeda blew himself up at a gathering at the Jeddah home of Prince Mohammed bin Naif, the deputy interior minister and a leading antiterrorism figure. After the failed assassination attempt, counterterrorism forces intensified a crackdown on those suspected of links to Al Qaeda. It was around this time that the Saudi government declared Ghali persona non grata and expelled him. “I don’t think he was flipped there,” one close associate told The Atlantic Monthly four years later. “I think he’d already begun to change. But the fact that he was pushed out . . . shows that his personal beliefs had begun to match up in a very tangible way with extremist ideology and behavior.”
When Ghali returned to Bamako from Saudi Arabia in late 2009, he began frequenting Bamako’s Green Mosque, a Salafi gathering place, where he preached the virtues of Shariah law to a large and enthusiastic following. On a Friday morning in 2009, he invited his friend Ansar to meet him there following afternoon prayers. In front of the mosque, as Wahhabis in long beards and robes walked past, Ghali again tried to coax him into the fundamentalist fold.
“Are you sure you’re not heading down the road of violence?” Ansar asked him.
Ghali shook his head emphatically. “We are pacifists,” he said.
Ansar saw Ghali a final time in February 2010. He was driving north from Bamako to the Festival on the Niger, an annual four-day concert, founded in 2005 as a southern Malian counterpart to the Festival in the Desert, and held on a barge moored off the riverbank in Ségou, 140 miles north of the capital. Ghali’s distinctive, bright orange four-wheel-drive overtook his car on the two-lane road and disappeared around a curve. Minutes later, Ansar spotted the vehicle at a gas station and parked beside it. Although his relationship with Ghali had grown distant in recent years, Ansar felt a keen desire to see his old friend. In high spirits about the music festival, Ansar recalled fondly the intimate jam sessions that he and Ghali had attended with a few friends on his rooftop and by the Niger River in the mid-1990s, before Tinariwen had achieved international acclaim, and before Ghali had fallen in with the Salafis.
Ansar remembered vividly the chain-smoking, music-loving, club-hopping bon vivant that Ghali had been in those days; the poet and lyricist who had written romantic ballads as well as martial songs for his friend, the singer-guitarist Ibrahim Ag Habib; and the hedonist who never prayed and hated being woken before noon. After parking his car, Ansar walked into the service station’s adjoining restaurant. Ghali was seated at a table in the corner with his wife, with whom Ansar had once also been on friendly terms. Wearing a hijab, she kept her eyes fixed on the table, refusing to look at him. Ghali wore a white skullcap and a white boubou over black pants. He looked austere, yet still filled up the room with his presence. He greeted Ansar with a curt hello.
“You are going where?” he asked.
“I’m heading for the festival in Ségou,” Ansar replied.
Ghali’s face sagged. He looked at Ansar with what seemed to be a mixture of pity and contempt. “In his mind, I was an old friend whom he had once loved, and whom he hadn’t been able to save from the grip of Satan,” Ansar recalled. All common ground between them, it was instantly clear, had been lost. After an excruciating silence that seemed to drag out for minutes, Ansar mumbled goodbye and walked out of the restaurant.