Abdel Kader Haidara spent Thursday, January 10, the day that the jihadi forces of Iyad Ag Ghali captured Konna and prepared to advance further south, ensconced at the spacious, sunlit home of the American expatriate Emily Brady near the Niger River in Bamako. They had been raising money from European donors, running a crowdsourcing campaign, and sending cash to couriers in the north. Haidara was also dashing back and forth between Brady’s home and the double-arched Porte d’Entrée marking the north entrance to the capital, receiving his couriers and guiding them and their precious cargo to twenty-five storage places around the city.
But the dramatic events on the ground had thrown the rescue operation into disarray. Hundreds of jihadi vehicles had just seized Konna, stranding the team’s couriers and the manuscripts. Now they were threatening to take over all of Mali. The Malian army had fallen back to Sévaré, the site of the regional airport. But the demoralized troops were in no condition to resist the jihadi onslaught, and their commander was talking openly about shedding his uniform, slipping into the bush, and creating a guerrilla force to combat the rebels.
Diplomats and Malian government officials in Bamako expected that the new front line would quickly collapse; from Sévaré, the Islamist army would have an easy, seven-hour journey straight down the highway to Bamako. Nothing would then prevent them from turning Mali into “Sahelistan”—an armed terrorist state in the heart of Africa. They would likely seize Western hostages for ransom and institute Shariah law in the capital. An exodus of diplomatic families and other expatriates from Bamako had begun; the U.S. embassy had initiated a test of its emergency notification service to prepare for the evacuation of two thousand American citizens. Neither Haidara nor the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts he had by now secreted in the homes of his partners would be safe. There would be nowhere left to hide.
As the day wore on, Haidara kept a cell phone on each ear, and a cell phone in each hand, receiving reports from his couriers every few minutes: the sweat acted as an adhesive, gluing the devices to his ears. “Bring me more tea,” he said, signaling Brady’s housekeeper. He drank dozens of cups of heavily sweetened tea every day. The sugar rush kept him going. But the constant stress had caused his weight to balloon, raised his blood pressure, and given him a gastric ulcer.
“You shouldn’t drink so much because of your stomach,” Brady said. He waved her off and drank another cup.
While Haidara and Brady were confronting the growing danger in the north, momentous decisions were being made a continent away. At the Élysée Palace in Paris, the French president, François Hollande, held an emergency meeting with his cabinet, took urgent calls from his ambassador in Bamako and from the interim Malian president, Dioncounda Traoré—the former leader of Mali’s National Assembly, who had replaced the head of the military junta in a deal brokered by regional governments—and conferred with Barack Obama at the White House.
Since well before the jihadi takeover of northern Mali, the French had been intensifying their on-the-ground operations in the desert spaces that had been all but abandoned by the Malian military. In January 2011, following the abduction of two twenty-five-year-old French friends, Vincent Delory and Antoine de Léocour, from a restaurant in Niamey, Niger, a French surveillance plane had pursued Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb through the desert into eastern Mali; there, French Special Forces ambushed the kidnappers, and the hostages were killed in the exchange of fire. Ten months later, a dozen French Special Forces commandos in Sévaré, near Mopti, were deployed to hunt for the abducted French geologists in Hombori. The French had lost patience with the Malian military—fed up with their complicity with drug traffickers and reports of their selling of weapons and ammunition to the radicals in the desert, convinced that they couldn’t be induced to fight. “The French were disgusted [by the Malian army],” recalled Vicki Huddleston, then serving as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa in Washington.
France’s historic and linguistic ties to its former colony, the prospect of a jihadi-controlled state in Francophone West Africa, and the presence of eight thousand French expatriates in Bamako led Hollande quickly to a decision: France would take military action to rescue the country from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Hollande, the leader of a European power that had frequently intervened in French-speaking Africa in recent years, from Rwanda to the Côte d’Ivoire to the Central African Republic, with varying motives and varying degrees of support, this time enjoyed a strong popular mandate. In a poll, seventy-five percent of the French public said that they backed a rapid strike against the radicals. “The French people are ready to support a military operation as long as the objectives are clear and seem legitimate,” one French defense analyst told The New York Times.
Hours after Iyad Ag Ghali marched triumphantly through the muddy alleys of Konna, people who lived near the Sévaré airport, thirty-six miles south, saw a helicopter land under cover of darkness and discharge fifteen white soldiers onto the tarmac. On Friday afternoon, January 11, a five-seat Aérospatiale Gazelle helicopter swept in low over Konna, and fired rockets at the militants’ positions. “At first we thought it belonged to the Malian army,” one trucker, who was burying the corpses of soldiers in a trench when the chopper arrived, told me a few days later, when I met him at a friend’s house in Sévaré. He returned to Konna and climbed onto his rooftop, “but all I could see was dust.” Militants fired back, striking the pilot in the groin, severing his femoral artery, and causing France’s first fatality in the conflict.
A second Gazelle engaged the jihadis later that afternoon. After dark, four Mirage 2000D jets carried out precise strikes on twelve jihadi vehicles and the military camp on a rise overlooking the Niger River in Konna. Ghali and his militants piled their dead and wounded into the beds of pickup trucks and began their long retreat north. Dozens of bodies littered the streets.
The Konna schoolteacher whom I had been talking to about the battle a year after it happened escorted me to the abandoned military camp on a rise above the Niger, briefly seized by the jihadis, and then attacked by French aircraft. A twelve-foot-deep crater filled with twisted metal and concrete was all that remained of two barracks in which the jihadis had encamped overnight. Back at his kindergarten and day-care center, the teacher unfolded a crudely made jihadi flag—fashioned from a piece of white linen, with a black field in the center and a pair of black-and-brown Kalashnikov rifles drawn in the white margins—and laid it out in front of me. He had ripped it off the radio antenna of a destroyed jihadi vehicle as the Al Qaeda soldiers fled from Konna. “This flag lived only for nineteen hours—from Thursday the 10th of January at 3:45 p.m. to Friday the 11th, at 10 a.m,” he had scrawled across the bottom margin.
Operation Serval, named after a small cat indigenous to the Sahara, gained momentum in the following days. French C-160 and An-124 transports airlifted ground troops, vehicles, and equipment into Bamako, and more French forces arrived by road from the Côte d’Ivoire. By January 15 France had eight hundred troops on the ground. The French government announced that it would triple the force to 2,500 soldiers by the end of January. Days later, the French bombed AQIM positions in the town of Diabily, near Djenné, captured by Abou Zeid and hundreds of his men on January 14. Hunkered down in the packed-dirt home of a Diabily farmer while his men camped under mango trees, the jihadi commander had planned to use Diabily as a base from which to continue his advance to Bamako. But French warplanes bombed them with precision, destroying dozens of vehicles. On January 17, the Islamists fled north under a withering French ground and air assault, camouflaging their remaining vehicles with so much foliage that they appeared to the population of Diabily like moving bushes.
The United States bore some responsibility for the Malian military debacle, having frittered away tens of millions of dollars on inadequate training of Malian soldiers. Now the Pentagon stepped into the fight: the United States airlifted hundreds of French troops and weapons aboard Air Force C-17 transport planes, refueled French warplanes with a KC-135 tanker aircraft, and provided drone surveillance. Vicki Huddleston, who had recently left the Department of Defense, called for vigorous U.S. “intelligence, equipment, financing, and training of a West African intervention force,” in The New York Times.
While Malians were quick to applaud the American assistance, some Malian intellectuals attacked the French intervention as a neocolonialist enterprise, and lashed out at former president Nicolas Sarkozy for his central role in the NATO attacks that had unseated Qaddafi and destabilized the region. But most Malians, including Abdel Kader Haidara, seemed ready to forgive the French missteps in Libya, and welcomed them with tricolors and the gratitude of the liberated.