In 2011 the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in Timbuktu was fast becoming one of the world’s most innovative manuscript conservation centers and a symbol of Timbuktu’s cultural renaissance. Abdel Kader Haidara had taken on twelve employees. A grant in 2007 from Dubai’s Juma Al Majid Center for Culture and Heritage had allowed him to build a laboratory for the repair and digitization of his manuscripts, and to create an annex with four gleaming exhibition rooms and a conference center. Haidara showed off to a visiting European reporter his new lab and his state-of-the-art photographic equipment; he used a digital camera rather than scanner, he explained, because the ultraviolet scanning technology could ignite the linen-based paper and the ferrous inks and destroy the manuscripts.
In his workshop, Haidara had begun manufacturing acid-free paper for restoring the manuscripts to mint condition—previously imported at a high cost—and he talked with the reporter about establishing a side business selling it to tourists and exporting it. A digitization seminar was taking place on the top floor of the library, its heterogeneous participants—“Arabs with short beards, Tuaregs with turbans and reading glasses, African faces,” the reporter observed—reflecting Timbuktu’s historic role as a melting pot of ethnic groups. Haidara was making plans to release a CD containing translations of an Arabic text about conflict resolution—“The Westerners come over here and try and tell us they invented it all,” he told his visitor—while awaiting the arrival of a team of South Africans from University of Cape Town for a manuscript conservation symposium.
Haidara was becoming an international man of letters. After the success of his first trip to the United States in 2003, for the inaugural American exhibition of African manuscripts, held at the Library of Congress, Haidara had been much sought after by libraries and museums around the world. He traveled frequently to New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, and other capitals, receiving honors, serving on academic panels, and acting as the master of ceremonies at traveling exhibitions of the Mamma Haidara Library’s manuscripts. He acquired a network of friends and colleagues abroad, became confident navigating his way through European and American cities—though he never mastered English—and found his world opening up in ways that he couldn’t have dreamed a decade earlier. He developed a familiarity with Western customs—though when he traveled in the West, he always dressed, as he did at home, in the traditional Malian robe, the boubou—learned about American and European religion, literature, music, and cuisine, and more practically, exchanged knowledge with Western counterparts about manuscript valuations and conservation techniques. At the same time, he would recall years later, “I tried to remain as modest as I could, as I had always been in Timbuktu.” He maintained the same friends in Timbuktu as he always had—boyhood playmates, associates from the world of manuscripts, along with the city’s intellectuals and imams.
As Haidara’s international and domestic profile rose, friends and elders pressed him to play a more active role in Timbuktu’s society by running for local office, becoming a government functionary, even joining the High Council of Islam, an Islamic civil society organization that spanned ideologies from Sufism to Wahhabism and provided social services and charity across the country. But Haidara always refused. He believed that participation in public life invited trouble, and that the role would compromise his dedication to the city’s libraries.
Like most of Timbuktu’s population, Haidara visited the shrines to the city’s Sufi saints occasionally, and he participated with enthusiasm every January in the Mawloud festival, a week-long celebration of the birthday of the Prophet that centered around the public reading of the city’s most cherished manuscripts, including both Korans and secular volumes. From time to time he consulted books about Islamic jurisprudence, the fikh, in his own collection when confronted with thorny problems in his marriage and his work. But religion did not play a major role in his life. What drove him most was a belief in the power of the written word—the rich variety of human experience and ideas contained between the covers of a book.
Haidara was not a wealthy man, but the Ahmed Baba Institute had generously remunerated him for fifteen years—he had earned substantial bonuses during his forays through the Malian bush—and he had accumulated enough money to expand his passion for manuscript collecting far beyond the borders of Mali. On one trip to New York City, while browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Manhattan, he came across an eighteenth-century volume of history from the Ottoman Empire, written in gilded Arabic letters and filled with maps and designs; the bookseller wanted $1,500 but Haidara, the expert negotiator, offered $800 and walked away with it for $1,000. The Ottoman history became one of the most valued volumes in his collection.
His life had changed in other ways. Haidara had a newborn son, who was born months prematurely and handicapped, unable to walk, sit up, or speak, a burden that would come to weigh heavily on Haidara’s life. Following the tradition of many successful Sorhai men, Haidara around this time took a second wife—a high-ranking Malian diplomat. But Haidara’s second marriage caused his first wife anguish, according to a close friend, and she berated him for his treatment of her. “The only time I ever saw him frazzled was after he married his second wife,” the friend said several years later. “He came to me, crying, and he said, ‘I had no idea that this would happen.’ ” The first wife grudgingly made her peace with the situation, tolerating his visits to Bamako to spend time with the second.
His turbulent personal life notwithstanding, Haidara had become a subject of glowing profiles in the international media. “Haidara is a man obsessed with the written word,” wrote Peter Gwin in a lengthy piece, “The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu,” that appeared in National Geographic in early 2011. “Books, he said, are ingrained in his soul, and books, he is convinced, will save Timbuktu. Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright. . . . Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life.” Gwin visited Haidara at his home near the Sankoré Mosque and found him looking over a nineteenth-century missive from Timbuktu’s elders to the sultan of Massina that supposedly showed evidence of a democratic awakening in Timbuktu. “He can spend hours sitting among the piles, dipping into one tome after another, each a miniature telescope allowing him to peer backward in time,” wrote Gwin. The manuscript revival in Timbuktu, the author noted, was having a spillover effect, prompting the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader to fifteen million Shi’ite Ismaili Muslims and a multimillionaire philanthropist whose wealth—derived mostly from religious contributions—has been estimated at as high as $3 billion, to restore a medieval mosque in the city. Muammar Al Qaddafi had purchased the government-owned Sofitel resort in expectation of future academic congresses being held there.
In the National Geographic profile, Haidara downplayed the hostage taking, drug running, and other criminal activities being carried out by jihadis and Tuareg rebels in the desert around Timbuktu. “Criminals, or whoever else it may be, are the least of my worries. Termites are my biggest enemies,” he told Gwin. “In my worst dreams,” he said, “I see a rare text that I haven’t read being slowly eaten.”
In January 2011, the month that the National Geographic profiled Haidara, events were set in motion that would shatter Haidara’s complacency. A popular revolt drove out Tunisia’s dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt fell a month later. Protests erupted against Qaddafi in Benghazi, in eastern Libya, and security forces killed more than one hundred demonstrators. Rebellion spread across the country. By the end of a month, Qaddafi’s government had lost control of much of Libya. Qaddafi claimed that Osama bin Laden had put “hallucinogenic drugs” in Libyans’ Nescafé to turn them into rebels, and vowed not to step down until he had cleaned Libya house by house of the “rats” and “cockroaches.” At other times he vowed to die like a “martyr.” NATO forces, acting on a United Nations Security Council resolution, enforced a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace and attacked Qaddafi’s army. NATO bombs pulverized barracks, TV stations, communications towers, and Qaddafi’s residential compound in Tripoli.
Haidara was astonished by the reversal of Qaddafi’s fortunes. Five years earlier the Libyan leader had made a state visit to Timbuktu—a three-day affair at the height of Qaddafi’s regional influence that had served as a showcase of his most erratic and megalomaniacal tendencies. In honor of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, the “King of African Kings,” as he called himself, had traveled by road the 606 miles to Timbuktu from Bamako, losing his escort, President Amadou Toumani Touré, en route, and taken up residence in a Moorish-style villa—La Maison Qaddafi—that he had built on the edge of the city. Timbuktu had been papered over with Libyan flags, banners of welcome, and life-sized posters of the Libyan leader. On his second evening he presided over a bizarre ceremony at Timbuktu’s soccer stadium, flooded with so many lights that it blew out the city’s electrical grid. Qaddafi called upon all nations to embrace Islam, denounced the Nobel Peace Prize–winning French aid group, Doctors Without Borders, as Western spies, declared George W. Bush and French president Jacques Chirac to be as “impure as beads of sweat,” and advocated the creation of a unified Sahara “in which imperialism will perish.” Then he flew back on his presidential jet to Tripoli without bidding Touré goodbye, leaving the Malian leader sitting in the airport terminal confused and humiliated, “with his head in his hands,” according to the Algerian ambassador to Mali. Now Qaddafi’s own regime was about to perish, and Haidara was incredulous at how fast the unraveling had happened. He didn’t yet imagine that the violence in Libya could reach across the Sahara to Timbuktu.
That spring, several hundred Tuaregs in Mali answered Qaddafi’s desperate plea for assistance. They departed for Libya in small convoys of SUVs, drove through the desert at night to avoid detection, gathered at mercenary camps, and joined Tuareg veterans who had left Mali for Libya years before and had served as mercenaries in Qaddafi’s army. One company of young Tuaregs rushed north through the Sahara to the coastal city of Misrata, where Qaddafi’s forces had surrounded the rebels and were starving them into submission. But as they approached the city, pausing for a night in a date palm plantation at the edge of the Sahara, NATO planes pounded government positions and broke the siege. “We knew that we had no chance,” recalled one young mercenary from Timbuktu, who had come to Qaddafi’s rescue in gratitude for his solidarity with the Tuareg separatists. “Qaddafi was going to die.” At that point, he recalled, his Tuareg commander said, “It’s time to go back to Mali.”
Tripoli, the Libyan capital, fell in late August. Days later, looters ripped off the unguarded double gates of a compound marked “Schoolbook Printing and Storage Warehouse” on the outskirts of the city. Inside the three-building complex, a poorly disguised arsenal, they pulled out antiaircraft missiles and thousands of other pieces of military ordnance. The scene was repeated across Libya. In the beds of their pickup trucks the fleeing Tuaregs placed a stockpile of antiaircraft guns, 12.7-millimeter machine guns, rockets, mortar tubes, artillery shells, BM-21 and BTR-60 ground-to-ground and ground-to-air missile launchers, and huge amounts of ammunition. Then they headed home.
It’s an age favorable to war, sang the band Terakaft, a desert-blues contemporary of Tinariwen. The years to come will be full of fury.
Convoys filled with Tuareg fighters and heavy weaponry traveled back to Mali through Niger. Eventually they arrived in an ancient riverbed of white sand called Zakak, tucked in the far northeast corner of Mali, near the Algerian border. By fall hundreds of fighters had gathered there, heavily armed and primed for rebellion. They called themselves the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, or the MNLA, the latest iteration of a dozen groups and movements that had formed over five decades to advance the pipe dream of Tuareg independence. Another four hundred men, equally well armed, camped in the desert a hundred miles away. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was also plundering Qaddafi’s abandoned armories, Belmokhtar told a Mauritanian newspaper in November 2011. Convoys of trucks dispatched by the jihadi group had rumbled across the Libyan desert in the immediate aftermath of Qaddafi’s fall, loading up with shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, known as MANPADS, antitank RPGs, Kalashnikovs, heavy machine guns, explosives, and ammunition. A United Nations report stated that a convoy intercepted in the Niger desert that fall carried “645 kilograms of Semtex plastic explosives and 445 detonators—meant for Al Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb camps in northern Mali.”
In late October, desperate to prevent another Tuareg uprising, President Touré dispatched Iyad Ag Ghali to northern Mali with cash, food, and an offer to integrate the secular Tuareg rebels into the Malian army. Following Ghali’s expulsion from Saudi Arabia for associating with known jihadis, and his return in disgrace to Mali, Touré had relegated him to a small office with little to do. But no other figure in the government, Touré believed, could persuade the rebels to disarm. Looking out over a sea of fighters wearing turbans neatly folded atop their heads and mismatched camouflage uniforms, Ghali, a burly, black-bearded, and still imposing figure at fifty-five, instead urged them to elect him their commander. He had crossed over to the other side once more, perhaps calculating that he had worn out his welcome with Touré’s government and had more to gain by taking up the insurgents’ cause.
The rebels responded with insults. Uncomfortable with Ghali’s Islamic fervor, and suspicious of his links to the Malian government, they overwhelmingly rejected him. “He was a good friend of Amadou Toumani Touré,” one young rebel would explain. “How could we trust him?”
By now Ghali had set himself on a course of rebellion from which there would be no turning back. Humiliated, the Tuareg leader climbed back into his vehicle, and, in a cloud of sand and dust, retreated across the desert to his stronghold, Kidal. He had money—at least 400,000 euros provided by Abou Zeid’s Tarek Ibn Ziyad Brigade of AQIM—and influence as the leader of the 1990 Tuareg rebellion, and his Islamic fervor struck a chord with several hundred members of his clan. In the following weeks Ghali created a new militia, including disaffected Tuareg members of the Malian military, restless former freedom fighters who had never adjusted to peace, and unemployed young men in Kidal. This force would be marching under the black banner of jihad. Ghali named his army “Ansar Dine,” or Defenders of the Faith, and he called for the implementation of Shariah law in the territory that it controlled.
In November 2011, Ghali and the two commanders of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, sat down to parley in the Zakak riverbed. It was familiar territory for all of them: not far away rose the Adrar des Ifoghas, the mountain redoubt where Ghali had first met them years earlier during the negotiations to free the European hostages. There, the Malian Tuareg and the Algerian Arabs officially sealed their jihadi alliance.
At nine o’clock one evening, two years later, I headed out of my Timbuktu hotel in the darkness for a clandestine meeting with a Tuareg secular rebel who had, I had been told, witnessed the jihadis’ fateful meeting in the desert. I rode on the back of a Tuareg guide’s motorcycle, bouncing over sandy alleys in the darkness. A bright yellow moon cast a weirdly elongated shadow of the motorbike on the rippled sand, and smudges of light here and there illuminated the doorways of groceries, cafés, hair salons, and other shops still open at this late hour. We passed the mud-brick ramparts of the Sidi Yahya Mosque, and the festering heaps of garbage at the edge of the city’s main bazaar, and then the alleys widened into broad, sandy tracks, marking the start of Abaradjou, a newer neighborhood of villas and half-built houses hidden behind high walls, where many of the city’s Tuaregs lived.
We found Yusuf—a tall twenty-six-year-old with an aquiline nose, his head wrapped in a pale blue turban—sitting on a bed in a spartan back room at his mother’s house. He had been living in a refugee camp in Mauritania, and had snuck back into Timbuktu for a few days to visit relatives in secret; animosity toward the Tuareg insurgents remained high in Timbuktu two years after the uprising, and he was terrified that his presence here would be discovered by some of his neighbors. Hence, he had insisted on a late night rendezvous, when the streets were empty and people were hunkered down inside their homes. Speaking quietly, clearly nervous, he told me that Ghali and the Al Qaeda jihadis “talked for hours” on a carpet laid out in the sand, not far from where he and his secular Tuaregs were encamped. “It happened at night, under the light of the moon,” Yusuf recalled.
After securing an alliance with his fellow jihadis, Ghali proposed to the Al Qaeda commanders that the Islamists join forces with the secular Tuareg rebels. The two groups had little in common: the Tuaregs wanted to create a secular independent state called Azawad that they had been fighting for for half a century. The jihadis sought to create a caliphate in northern Mali in which they would impose Shariah law, train terrorists, and steadily expand their Islamist state across northern Africa. The group had already made an alliance with Boko Haram, in northern Nigeria, the brutal Islamist terrorist group that has murdered as many as ten thousand Nigerians since its founding in the northern town of Maiduguri in 2002. The deal between the Tuareg rebels and Al Qaeda would be a marriage of convenience that would allow them to pool their fighters and the heavy weapons they had stolen out of Qaddafi’s armories, overwhelm the weak Malian army, and carve an independent state out of a region as large as France. As American intelligence officials and diplomats had feared, Iyad Ag Ghali was now serving as the midwife to a pact between Malian Tuareg independence fighters and Algerian Arab Islamists—the two prime destabilizing forces in the Malian Sahara.
The secular Tuaregs were divided. Many considered the “The Bearded Ones” dangerous people and feared being associated with them.
“I knew Al Qaeda. I knew their reputation, their criminality,” said Yusuf, brewing me a cup of tea. He had always considered himself to be “relaxed” about religion, he insisted. “These were people who were being hunted by the international community. How could we be joining forces with them?”
The majority, however, believed that they had no choice. The route to independence, they said, required making unsavory compromises. Alone the Tuaregs would certainly fail. An alliance with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb would guarantee their victory.