Abdel Kader Haidara’s couriers were grounded, and war had broken out across the north. The French intervention had stopped the jihadis from capturing Bamako and declaring all of Mali a caliphate. But as hundreds of French troops advanced toward Timbuktu, the militants were enraged and threatening to take revenge. The manuscripts were at risk from both Al Qaeda, who seemed likely to lash out at anything that the West considered valuable, and from the French military, which had turned the entire north into a zone of gunfire and destruction. Missiles had slammed into jihadi barracks and military bases, command-and-control centers, villas appropriated by extremist commanders, and hundreds of vehicles. Mirage jets, Super Pumas, Tigers, Harfang drones, Alpha Jets, C-130s, and Mi-35s streaked across the skies of northern Mali. French helicopters pursued the radicals’ convoys into the roadless desert. Ground forces moved north to Timbuktu and Gao and sealed the roads to civilian traffic. A total of 791 footlockers containing 100,000 manuscripts remained hidden in safe houses in Timbuktu. They faced a growing threat of being found and destroyed; Haidara could not afford to wait. He was obliged to consider the only viable alternative to the road: the Niger River.
Emily Brady had pressed him from the early days of the evacuation to bring at least some of the manuscripts to government territory via the river, but Haidara had refused. He was worried, he said, about fast-moving currents and unpredictable winds, horrified by the possibility that a pinasse could capsize and send his manuscripts to the bottom of the Niger. But now that he had reluctantly changed his mind, the mule carts that had carried the chests from libraries to safe houses during the summer were called into action again. Down rough tracks through rice paddies and vegetable fields, too narrow for cars, the carts pulled stacks of trunks toward the river. Village chiefs, whom Haidara had come to know in his travels throughout the region, opened their mud-walled homes for temporary storage. In Toya, a village of Sorhai fishermen, consisting of a few dozen flat-roofed mud huts lining bare sandbanks about seven miles from Timbuktu, the hereditary chief, Mohannan Sidi Maiga, played a critical and clandestine role.
I visited Toya one sweltering August afternoon long after the boatlift was over, chartering a pinasse at Timbuktu’s main port of Kabara—a thirty-foot-long craft with five pink-cushioned benches, and a hull brightly painted in blue, yellow, and green arabesques. The pilot motored the pinasse slowly down the center of the olive green Niger. A canvas roof tethered to curving wooden supports shielded me from the sun. The river widened, and a steady wind blew across the bow, rocking the creaky wooden vessel alarmingly. The landscape on either side of the river was brown and barren, rising gently, speckled with grass and lone acacia trees. “The Niger, with its vast and misty horizons, is more like an inland ocean than a river,” wrote Félix Dubois in Timbuctoo the Mysterious, which I had brought along with me on this journey. “Its waters break upon its banks in the monotonously cadenced waves of the Mediterranean shores; and when winds, grown violent in the desert, swell its waves into a great race, seasickness will convince the most rebellious that the river Niger is of kin to oceans.”
After a turbulent, thirty-minute journey that made me understand Haidara’s hesitancy about transporting the manuscripts by river, we arrived in Toya, clambered past women scrubbing their laundry with bars of thick brown soap in the shallows, and walked through sandy warrens to the home of Maiga, a lanky man in a red T-shirt and gray slacks, whose skinny arms hung to his knees. “When the jihadis arrived [in April 2012] we sensed the danger, and people from Savama-DCI visited us here to tell us that they might need our help,” he told me, as we sat in plastic chairs beneath a burlap tarp, suspended by bamboo poles, in an outdoor meeting area next to his house.
One moonlit night in the middle of January, as the French ground forces rolled toward Timbuktu, the footlockers arrived in donkey carts. Maiga distributed them among the villagers. “Toya is off the track, it’s a little more hidden than the main port, so we figured they would be safe here,” he told me. Even so, Maiga knew that the Islamic Police could raid the village at any time. “The jihadis had passed through here many times during the occupation, to make sure that women were covered and that people were applying their version of Islam,” he said. “They arrested nonmarried men and women, boys and girls, who were together. They tied their hands behind their backs and took them to Timbuktu.”
While he and other village chiefs were preparing the manuscripts for transport by water, Haidara’s team in Timbuktu traveled to Kabara, five miles south of Timbuktu. In the once bustling, now dead quiet port, where pinasses from Bamako and Mopti had, before the jihadi occupation, brought a steady flow of electronics, sacks of grain, and other goods—as well as Western tourists—to Timbuktu, the team struck up discreet conversations with boatmen. Most were idle, desperate for work, simmering with hostility toward the Islamists, and eager to pitch in to save the country’s patrimony.
Haidara’s team recruited dozens, and laid out the rules: Each pinasse would have two couriers and two captains, so that they could keep moving on the river twenty-four hours a day. No vessel could carry more than fifteen footlockers, to minimize losses should any boat be seized or sunk. The boats would load at beachfront villages such as Toya to avoid attracting the jihadis’ attention. Their destination would be Djenné, located on the floodplain between the Niger and the Bani Rivers, 223 miles and two days south of Timbuktu. Once the footlockers had been unloaded safely in government territory, trucks, taxis, and other vehicles would receive the cargo and continue the journey to Bamako, 332 miles further south.
While Haidara and his team prepared to launch the boatlift, the jihadi army was in retreat. Two convoys of blood-streaked pickup trucks, led by Iyad Ag Ghali and Abou Zeid and filled with corpses and the groaning and bloodied injured, made their way back toward Timbuktu, while another convoy veered off toward Gao. Choking clouds of sand and dust rose above Abou Zeid and Ghali’s caravans as they rolled for hours along the rough track beneath a sweltering sun. The militant leaders had planned to converge triumphantly with their forces in Bamako and declare Mali a jihadi state. But they had not anticipated the rapid intervention of the French army, and their miscalculation had brought about a debacle. Upon reaching Timbuktu, the militant leaders dropped the injured at the government hospital, buried the dead, and demanded that the director of Radio Azawad, formerly Radio Communal Bouctou, announce that the jihadis had defeated the Malian army.
“We killed and injured hundreds of them,” Ghali declared.
“How many did you lose?” the director asked.
“That isn’t your concern,” the jihadi leader replied.
Soon the French army made its first aerial forays over the city. Drones and French warplanes buzzed in the skies, a portent of the coming attack.
The imam of Timbuktu’s most venerated mosque, Djingareyber, approached the jihadi authorities, who had turned increasingly agitated and hostile, regarding a matter of great importance for the city’s Sufis. Mawloud, the weeklong celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, and the most joyful occasion on Timbuktu’s calendar, fell on the 21st of January, only days away. Originating as a Shi’ite festival in Persia in the twelfth century, Mawloud had arrived in Timbuktu around 1600, and it had been celebrated with gusto ever since. A period of feasting, singing, and dancing, Mawloud combined the rituals of Sufi Islam with a celebration of Timbuktu’s rich literary traditions. It culminated with an evening gathering of thousands of people in the large sandy square in front of the Sankoré Mosque and a public reading of some of the city’s most treasured manuscripts. For a city that had been starved of a reason to celebrate for nearly a year, the imam of Djingareyber saw Mawloud as a critical morale booster, a reed of hope for a despondent population.
The imam asked Abou Zeid for permission to plan the festivities. “Normally our marabouts read from our manuscripts for this festival,” the imam explained.
“I don’t have a problem with this, imam,” Abou Zeid said, surprising the religious leader with his apparent receptivity. But Abou Zeid added that he was a fighter, not an intellectual, and would have to defer to his “religious experts.”
Al Qaeda’s minister of moral enforcement in Timbuktu listened impassively as the imam, joined by members of Timbuktu’s Crisis Committee, made an emotional plea for the festival.
“That holiday does not exist,” he announced when they had finished. It constituted a “reprehensible innovation.” He cited a Hadith in which the Prophet had declared, “I urge you to follow my Sunnah and the way of the rightly guided caliphs after me; adhere to it and cling to it firmly. Beware of newly invented things, for every newly invented thing is an innovation (bid’ah) and every innovation is a going-astray.”
“But it is sanctioned by other Hadith,” the imam argued.
“Bring me proof,” the bearded, turbaned morality minister replied.
The Sufi imams of Timbuktu, marabouts, and members of the crisis group created a “Committee of Proof” to assemble all the evidence they could muster from the texts supporting the festival. Although many Sunni scholars had railed through the centuries against making the Prophet’s birthday a special occasion, the Committee of Proof found Hadith that suggested that some leeway existed. Several Hadith commanded Muslims to “venerate” the Prophet, without stipulating the manner in which that should be done. Verse 114 from the Surah Al-Ma’idah in the Koran suggested that the earliest followers of the Prophet considered feasting a proper way to commemorate an event of religious significance. “Eisa, the son of Maryam, said, ‘O Allah, O our Lord! Send down to us a table spread from heaven, so that it may become a day of celebration for us.’ ” And Mohammed himself had acknowledged the glory of the day that he came into the world: “The Holy Prophet (Peace and Blessings of Allah be Upon Him) said: ‘When my mother gave birth to me she saw a light proceeding from her which showed her the castles of Syria.’ ”
Al Qaeda’s morality minister again listened without a change of expression as the Committee of Proof recited the relevant verses. “Fine,” he said when they were done. “But you still can’t do it. There will be men and women meeting in the streets, and that is inappropriate. You can’t do it. That’s it. There won’t be a Mawloud festival.”
Then the morals enforcer delivered a chilling message. “You need to bring us those manuscripts,” he said, “and we are going to burn them.”
In the gathering darkness, with Timbuktu’s jihadi leaders demanding the manuscripts and the members of the Crisis Committee promising to deliver them, but stalling for time, a lone vessel left from Toya on a test run. The thirty-foot boat motored down the center of the river, passing flat mud banks, thatched huts, and low dunes silhouetted against the twilight sky. “The moments of sunset upon the river are those of the greatest intensity of life,” Dubois wrote in Timbuctoo the Mysterious. “The canoes multiply near the villages bringing the fruit of the field to buildings to which the people will flock for tomorrow’s market . . . and the great trees on the banks are so whitened at this hour by the sleeping ospreys that they seem to have been covered by a fall of snow.” Swells thrashed against the vessel as it cut through the water toward Djenné. Then, with alarm, the couriers and captains heard an engine and the whir of rotor blades. A French attack helicopter swooped down low over the water and hovered above the craft. The pilots shone spotlights on the boat, blinding those onboard. “Open the footlockers,” they demanded over a loudspeaker. The French warned the crew that they would sink the boat on suspicion of smuggling weapons if the couriers refused. The terrified teenaged couriers fumbled with the locks beneath the glare, flung the chests open, and then stepped aside. The pilots could see that the chests were filled with only paper. The helicopters flew off.
Shortly afterward, twenty pinasses, each carrying fifteen metal chests filled with manuscripts, motored in a convoy down the Niger from a port near Timbuktu. Haidara and Brady had decided that the boats should travel in flotillas, both to speed up the evacuation and provide, they hoped, a certain safety in numbers. Passing beyond the monochromatic emptiness of Tuareg territory, they reached a transition zone where the arid Saharan wastes give way to more fertile climes—palm trees, thickets of low bushes. Ahead lay Lake Debo, the inland sea formed by the seasonal flooding of central Mali’s inland Niger Delta, “a huge basin of water . . . a veritable sea. . . . Its shores are invisible, for no distant mountains betray their boundaries,” Dubois wrote.
But as they approached the lake, the Niger seemed to disappear before their eyes, swallowed up by a sea of grass. “It is in truth a singular element, being neither land nor water, but a strange mixture of both,” Dubois observed. “From a depth of six to eight feet the tall grasses emerge, thick and green, and wearing all the appearance of a great field. . . . We are no longer upon the water, but seem . . . to be sliding over grassy steppes streaked with watery paths.” The aquatic meadow formed an ideal sanctuary during this period of chaos for bandits. As the convoy threaded its way along channels through the grass, a dozen turbaned men brandishing Kalashnikovs emerged from the dense vegetation. They ordered the flotilla to stop. Forcing open the locks, the men thumbed through the Arabic texts and brightly colored geometric patterns covering the brittle pages.
“We will keep these,” they announced.
The couriers pleaded with them and offered their cheap Casio watches, silver bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When that failed, they got on the phone with Haidara, in Bamako. He urged the bandits to release the couriers and the cargo, promising to deliver a sizeable ransom as soon as possible.
“Trust me on this, we will get you your money,” Haidara said.
Haidara couldn’t afford not to pay them, he would later explain: thousands of other manuscripts were already heading downriver. The couriers waited nervously beside their metal trunks while the bandits debated what to do. At last, the gunmen, understanding Haidara’s predicament, released the boats and the manuscripts. One of Haidara’s agents, as promised, delivered the cash four days later.
At Brady’s home in Bamako, Haidara spent fifteen hours a day talking simultaneously on eight cell phones to his team of couriers, whom he had instructed to brief him every fifteen minutes when they were on the road. Huge sheets of brown butcher paper taped to one wall tracked the names of the teenagers, their latest cell phone contacts, the number of footlockers each was carrying, their locations, and conditions en route. Brady sent text messages to her donors informing them of progress: 75 FOOTLOCKERS GOING THROUGH, OUR KIDS HAVE MADE IT ACROSS LAKE DEBO, ARE NOW IN MOPTI. During one frenetic day toward the end of the boatlift, 150 taxicabs, each carrying three footlockers and a courier, made the journey from Djenné to Bamako.
In Timbuktu, French Mirage jets bombed Al Qaeda’s barracks and then targeted Abou Zeid’s residence—delivering a rocket that blew out the back half of Qaddafi’s former villa and wrecked the salon where the King of African Kings, then the Al Qaeda emir, had held meetings and receptions. Abou Zeid, anticipating the French attack, had vacated the premises well ahead of time.
A few months after the attack I followed a faint sand track past thorn trees and a few walled-off compounds to a rise in the desert. Behind an iron gate stood a Moorish-style villa of beige concrete, with oblong windows and turquoise ornamental trim, surrounded by a garden of pine and palm trees. “We still call this place ‘Chirac’s Dune,’ ” my Tuareg guide, Azima Ag Ali Mohammed, told me. In 2006, he explained, Qaddafi had chosen to build this desert retreat on the exact site where the French president had met hundreds of dignitaries in a Tuareg tent during a 2003 tour of Francophone West Africa. “Qaddafi was jealous of Western leaders,” Azima went on, and wanted to prove that he was their equal.
We squeezed through a gap in the gate and walked through the unlocked front door. “This is where Abou Zeid held his meetings,” he said, leading me into a low-ceilinged room divided by square columns. Shards of glass, marble tile fragments, and chunks of concrete littered the floor. Broken roof slabs blocked the view of the garden. As I walked around the outside of the house—skirting the charred remains of a Nissan sedan, bullet casings, and rubber hoses from Qaddafi’s irrigation system—I heard a rustling. I looked up, startled, to see a white-robed herdsman leading six donkeys up and over the huge pile of rubble. “Salaam Aleikum,” he said, with a deferential nod of his head, then continued on his way.
After the French scored a direct hit on Abou Zeid’s residence, the Al Qaeda emir summoned the Crisis Committee for a final meeting. The hospitals were overflowing with the dead and injured, Ibrahim Khalil Touré remembered, and the jihadi leader was in a somber mood. Letting his calm demeanor slip for the first time, Abou Zeid slammed his hand down on the table in the dark conference room. “There can be no mockery of us,” he warned. “If we see anyone celebrating in front of his house, he will be immediately killed. If we see anybody laughing or ridiculing us, he will be killed.” Abou Zeid warned Touré and the other committee members that the penalty for looting Arab shops in revenge would also be death. “The population should stay calm, and should not aid the enemy, and not mock us as long as we are here,” he reemphasized. Abou Zeid dismissed the group at nine o’clock that night. The end, Touré was sure, was imminent.
The next morning, Iyad Ag Ghali packed his Land Cruiser and slipped out of town. His dreams of a caliphate unified under Shariah law had collapsed, and the protean figure that had morphed from rebel leader to presidential security adviser to jihadi had taken on a new identity: fugitive. Abou Zeid lingered in town for another four days. On Friday, January 25, after prayers, he and his lieutenants slaughtered a lamb and prepared a méchoui—the entire animal skinned and roasted on a spit—and ate it in the dunes. Abou Zeid placed his five European hostages in a pair of SUVs and drove out of the city in a nine-vehicle convoy. His militiamen destroyed the city’s mobile phone tower and stripped the radio station of its consoles and computers. Then they turned their attention to the objects that they had mostly ignored until now: the manuscripts.