Emily Brady, the manuscript conservator from Washington state, had been urging Haidara to evacuate the manuscripts to government territory from the first days of the jihadi takeover. Haidara had always given her the same answer: “It’s still not time.” He couldn’t bear the thought of again scattering the treasures that he had consolidated in Timbuktu. They were meant to be in the desert, he insisted, the place where they had been created, traded, and stored for centuries. But Haidara was coming to realize that at some point he would have to remove them.
“You must get them out,” Western embassy officials and several of his benefactors in Europe and the Middle East advised him. “These are terrible people. They will destroy everything before they leave.”
In the summer of 2012, a confluence of events prodded Haidara toward the drastic step that he had been delaying for months. The jihadis of Timbuktu went on their rampage in July, destroying a dozen Sufi shrines. In August, Libyan Wahhabis, known as Najdis, outdid their Timbuktu counterparts. They desecrated dozens of graves in a Sufi cemetery in Tripoli’s Old City, knocked down a mausoleum in Misrata and three in Tripoli, bulldozed and blew up the shrine of a fifteenth-century Sufi scholar in the Mediterranean coastal town of Zlitan, and fired mortar rounds at the mosque and library of Al Asmari University in the same city. The shells ignited a fire inside the library that burned thousands of manuscripts to ashes. “This is clear: what people are now doing in terms of digging up old graves and demolishing mosques is contrary to the Sunnah and the sayings of scholars,” Abdelrahman Al Gharyani, the grand mufti of Libya, the spiritual leader of the country’s Sunni Muslim community, declared, in a futile attempt to curb the Salafis’ rampage. The wave of destruction served as a frightening premonition of what could lie in store for Timbuktu.
Haidara recalled, “I knew we didn’t have much time.”
Compounding the pressure on Haidara was the north’s economic collapse and the consequent breakdown of law and order in Timbuktu. Livestock trading and butchering were staples of the region’s economy, but Tuareg and Arab herders, fearful of being accused of collaboration with the occupiers, fled the Timbuktu area and took all of their animals with them. (Together, the Arabs and Tuaregs comprised about forty percent of Timbuktu’s total population.) Arab shopkeepers boarded up their stores, many of which had been ransacked during the early wave of looting in Timbuktu. The tourist industry had long ago withered and died, and local government services ground to a halt. With the banks looted, it became impossible to take out money. Most residents of Timbuktu became dependent on their relatives in Bamako, Mopti, and other cities in the south, who brought them periodic infusions of cash. The growing unemployment and deepening poverty set off a wave of burglaries and robberies. Gangs burst into private residences and snatched anything they could lay their hands on. “We began to panic,” Emily Brady remembered. “We said, ‘Okay, pretty soon there will be nothing to be seized but the manuscripts. We’ve got to get them out.’ ”
Brady perceived an opportunity: at the end of July the secular Tuareg rebels had fled from Timbuktu. Faced with a shortage of fighters, the jihadis had been obliged to dismantle all but two checkpoints between Timbuktu and government territory. Controls on the roads going south had all but disappeared.
“It’s time,” Brady told Haidara.
“It’s time,” he agreed.
Sitting across from each other in Brady’s sunlit dining room in Bamako, where she was still spending much of the year, Haidara and Brady discussed the logistical challenges that lay ahead of them. Transporting hundreds of thousands of priceless and fragile artifacts over 606 miles of unpredictable terrain would, they understood, be dangerous and hugely expensive. They would need to hire couriers and drivers and rent hundreds of trucks, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and taxis. They would require cash for bribes, spare parts, repairs, and gasoline. Brady calculated a budget of $700,000, and she and Haidara reached out to their contacts around the world. After hesitating in the initial stage of the rescue, donors had seen what the jihadis were capable of doing and many rushed to contribute. Haidara secured $100,000 from one of his most generous benefactors: Dubai’s Juma Al Majid Center. The rescuers appealed to other longtime supporters, including the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands. “We’re desperate,” Brady said. A grant of $135,000 came through. A Kickstarter campaign raised another $60,000. The Dutch National Lottery, one of the richest cultural foundations in the Netherlands, wired $255,000 to Bamako.
Brady turned next to the director of a Dutch government development agency in Bamako. European missions in Mali had plenty of unspent money in their coffers, because of a European Union embargo on bilateral aid to the Mali government since the military coup; the Dutch came up with another $100,000. Key Bank, an American regional institution headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, arranged for those dollar contributions to be sent by wire transfer to Malian banks. The money was deposited into the Bamako accounts of trusted merchants in Timbuktu. The merchants then turned over cash, as needed, to Haidara’s team.
In Timbuktu, Mohammed Touré cast about for sturdy four-wheel-drive vehicles—few were in good shape in the city—and recruited drivers and couriers. Emily Brady and Haidara were reluctant to use the same teams over and over—fearful they would be recognized and arrested—so they advised Mohammed Touré to hire as many couriers as he could. They ended up with hundreds. The majority were teenagers, the sons and nephews of Timbuktu’s librarians—people whose loyalty would remain unquestioned.
At dawn one morning in late August, Mohammed Touré parked a Land Cruiser in front of a safe house in Timbuktu and loaded it with five chests filled with 1,500 manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Library. Each chest was four feet long by two feet wide and two feet deep, and could snugly fit up to eight stacks of manuscripts—which ranged from single sheets, or folios, to thick volumes encased in leather covers. He draped a blanket over the footlockers, and climbed in the Land Cruiser beside the driver. Touré would be the test case, whose success or failure would determine the future of the operation.
A chill desert wind blew as they pulled away from the safe house and, beneath a brightening sky, drove south, past the Islamic Police headquarters in the former Commercial Bank of Mali, past a handful of once popular, now deserted guesthouses that lined the main street heading out of town, through the southern gate. The turbaned fighters who manned the first checkpoint on the southern outskirts of Timbuktu waved him through. They passed the municipal airport and there the tarmac ended. They crossed the Niger by car ferry and then for several hours drove unmolested on the sand track south, through an undulating landscape of dried-out riverbeds and faint patches of grass, scattered acacias, and scrub. In a market town called Douentza, they hit the second jihadi roadblock. Touré waved innocently, and they drove through without stopping.
They reached Konna, beside the Niger, a town of mud huts, labyrinthine alleyways, and a small mosque modeled after the Great Mud Mosque of Djenné. Konna marked the start of Malian government territory. Touré called Haidara on his cell phone and informed him with relief that he was now in the zone of safety. Then, just south of the line of control, his illusions of being safe dissolved. Malian troops—edgy, demoralized, and suspicious of anyone coming from the occupied north—stopped him at Sévaré, thirty-four miles south of the border.
The soldiers peered into the back. “What are you carrying?” they demanded. They pointed rifles at his chest and ordered him out. “Remove the trunks.” One by one Touré and his driver pulled the manuscript-filled chests out of the rear compartment.
“What are you hiding here? Are you smuggling weapons?”
“No sir,” Touré stammered, fearful that he would be thrown in prison or, this being wartime, even shot on the spot.
“Are you a spy? A jihadi?”
“No sir.”
The soldiers smashed the locks on the chests with their gun butts, pulled out the volumes, and flipped roughly through the fragile pages. Touré kept silent as he watched them manhandle the precious volumes.
For two days and nights they kept him and his driver under guard in their spartan camp beside the roadblock, keeping him fed but refusing to explain why they were detaining him. He was frustrated, infuriated, but he kept his emotions under control. At last, they told him he could go. In Sévaré he paid off the driver and hired a new vehicle; the grueling drive over sand tracks and dirt roads from Timbuktu had damaged the suspension, steering box, and shock absorbers. Moreover, he was afraid that his captors had given the plate number to their comrades further south and they would stop him again.
This time, they stayed off the main road to Bamako, fearful of encountering more military roadblocks. They followed red-earth tracks through a landscape of skeletal thorn trees and dark sandstone outcroppings, occasionally passing herders with their goats, but few other signs of life. But the driver repeatedly lost his way. He was confused by the crisscrossing trails, and the four-wheel-drive vehicle, riding low because of the extra weight, broke down twice in the middle of flat, featureless brush. In the riverside town of Ségou—a pleasantly dilapidated town of rutted streets, motor scooters, donkey carts, and a few faded colonial-era villas 140 miles north of Bamako—Touré hit another military checkpoint marked by four-foot-high metal oil drums strewn across the road. “What’s this? What are you doing? What are you smuggling?” they demanded. As Touré watched helplessly, the soldiers broke the locks with their gun butts for the second time, and rifled through the manuscripts one by one. He repacked, hired yet another vehicle, and got back on the road. By now he had had enough. Touré decided that the only way he could avoid further harrassment was to hire a military escort.
At a military post on the outskirts of Ségou he announced himself, explained his problem, and chatted with the local commander. “I need two vehicles filled with soldiers to get through the roadblocks. And I can pay you generously,” he said. The commander assembled vehicles and troops. With military vehicles behind him and in front, Touré traveled the last 140 miles to Bamako without incident. At one o’clock in the morning, he paid the troops, shook hands with the men, and they turned around and returned to Ségou. Then, just down the road at the Porte d’Entrée, a mud-brown, double-arched gateway adorned with brown spires that resembled those of the Great Mud Mosque of Djenné, where the military searched every vehicle entering the capital, Touré found himself detained again. Exhausted and hungry, he was taken to a camp, thrown into a filthy cell, given nothing to eat or drink, and interrogated. Touré was permitted one phone call, to Haidara, who arrived at dawn with tea and bread, ate with him in his cell, and freed him with a “gift” to his jailers.
It had been a terrible ordeal that had lasted a week, yet no sooner had Touré delivered his cargo to Haidara than he returned to Timbuktu and prepared for the next journey. Touré would make more than thirty round-trips between Timbuktu and Bamako during the course of the rescue mission, personally saving tens of thousands of manuscripts. With each trip the going got easier: soldiers and police soon came to recognize him, and readily accepted his bribes in exchange for safe passage.
Every day, sometimes five times a day, Haidara traveled to the Porte d’Entrée, on Bamako’s northern outskirts. Lengthy negotiations—and the invariable payment of gifts—allowed his couriers to slip through unmolested. Some returned to Bamako so shaken that they dropped out after a single mission, but most remained committed to the end. Haidara’s supporters in Bamako stored rescued manuscripts temporarily in their houses, until a more lasting solution could be found. During the first ninety days, Haidara’s couriers evacuated about 270,000 of the 377,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu, nearly three quarters of the books that had been held in the city’s safe houses. Miraculously, despite being roughly treated by soldiers at roadblocks, all came through intact.
In July, when the jihadis took absolute control of the city of Timbuktu and instituted Shariah law, Haidara sent for his wife and their three younger children. Arriving in Bamako two days later, they settled with difficulty into their new home. Displaced relatives crowded the five rooms. The streets outside were noisy and squalid, a jumble of shabby concrete-block buildings and exhaust-spewing motorbikes. Haidara’s wife, who had spent her life in Timbuktu, with the exception of her university years, fell into melancholy and barely ventured outdoors. Yet Haidara found it difficult to focus on his family’s needs. The rescue effort, the responsibilities he felt toward Timbuktu’s library owners and to his couriers, and the attachment he felt toward his own archive, overwhelmed all other concerns. “I had so many worries,” he recalled months later. “They had entrusted everything to me. And if anything happened to their manuscripts, it would all be on my head.”
“I saw him with the manuscripts, and I realized that this man has a direct relationship with them,” said Emily Brady. “He feels as close to them as he does to his children.”
And every day, it seemed, there was a new crisis, another risk of exposure. Early one morning, at the height of the smuggling operation, luck seemed to have run out for Haidara’s nephew Mohammed Touré as he was exiting Timbuktu. Al Qaeda guards stopped his vehicle, searched the rear compartment, found metal chests filled with manuscripts beneath blankets, and ordered his driver at gunpoint to turn around. Islamic Police handed the cache—and Mohammed Touré—over to Abou Zeid. Once again, the twenty-five-year-old called upon every contact he had to bail him out of trouble.
Ibrahim Khalil Touré, the head of the Djingareyber neighborhood, influential member of the Crisis Committee, and close friend of Abdel Kader Haidara, paid another visit to Abou Zeid at the governor’s headquarters, with the committee chairman. Both men vouched again for Mohammed Touré and “guaranteed” that the manuscripts were simply being taken out of Timbuktu for repairs. “That is the only reason, and then they will be brought back,” Khalil Touré promised the jihadi leader. Perhaps Abou Zeid had other matters on his mind, or was feeling favorably disposed to Khalil Touré. “He had confidence in us, and we were his only liaison to the population of Timbuktu,” Khalil Touré recalled. Whatever the case, Abou Zeid was willing to take Khalil Touré at his word. After forty-eight hours, to the surprise and relief of the Crisis Committee members, the emir of Timbuktu allowed Haidara’s nephew to get back on the road with his cargo.
Touré had taken to sleeping at night in one of the empty exhibition rooms at the Mamma Haidara Library, to protect it from vandalism. Early one morning he heard a knock at the front door. When he opened it, Touré confronted three men carrying a video camera and a sound boom. They introduced themselves as a television documentary team from an international news channel, which had received permission from Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to document the conditions in occupied Timbuktu.
“You cannot come in,” Touré told them, and double locked the door. Half an hour later, the film crew returned. This time they brought an escort of militants. The jihadis pushed their way inside and, as Touré stood by helplessly, led the crew through the library. Glass cases stood empty. The workshops where manuscripts were digitized, repaired with the strong Japanese Kitakata paper, and stored in moisture-proof boxes, were bare. “Where are the manuscripts?” the militants demanded.
“I . . . I have no idea,” Touré said. “The proprietors must have taken them all. I don’t know what happened.”
The film crew and their jihadi escorts left, and Touré never heard another word about the incident.