General Bernard Barrera, the newly appointed commander of French ground forces in Mali, landed in Bamako on January 21, ten days after the start of Operation Serval, and on the very day that was to mark the start of the now canceled Mawloud festival in Timbuktu. He set up a temporary headquarters in an airport hangar, flew by helicopter one week later to the just-liberated towns of Gao and Timbuktu, and established a forward command post at the U.S.-built military base in Tessalit, the gateway to the Adrar des Ifoghas massif. Iyad Ag Ghali’s men had occupied the compound for nearly a year and stripped it bare. In the looted headquarters, Barrera—a third-generation infantry officer from Marseille and a veteran of Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, and Afghanistan—laid plans for a search-and-destroy mission against the jihadis. In Bamako, Mali’s army chief of staff had predicted that the radicals would take refuge in the most impregnable corner of the Adrar des Ifoghas. “Go to the Ametettaï Valley,” he had told Barrera. “That’s where you will find the enemy.”
Barrera knew that they had to move quickly. He had brought a copy of Joseph Césaire Joffre’s memoir of his expedition to Timbuktu in 1893–1894, and the descriptions by the future World War I commander in chief of French forces on the Western Front, of “desolate, near-desert country under a burning sun,” the “scarcity of water,” “intense heat,” and the “mountain defiles of difficult access” weighed on him. The extreme conditions in the Adrar des Ifoghas and the hundreds-miles-long supply lines would wear down Barrera’s men quickly. “We have to seize this valley in one week to ten days, or the battle is lost,” he told his staff. The stakes were significant: a French withdrawal without a decisive defeat of the jihadis would give Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb an enormous propaganda victory, potentially drawing thousands more recruits to the cause, and throwing Mali into deeper chaos. For Abdel Kader Haidara, who was following the looming battle in the north as best he could from his Bamako sanctuary, the crushing of the extremists was essential. Only then, he knew, could he finish his monumental task, and return the 377,000 manuscripts to their desert home.
The Amettetaï is one of four interlocking valleys in the heart of the massif, and the only one with a year-round supply of water. For decades it served as a sanctuary for Tuareg insurgents, drug traffickers, and Islamist extremists. The valley runs east to west for twenty-five miles, and is eight hundred yards wide at its western entrance. Low gray and black granite hills, eroded to rubble and pocked with caves, rise on both sides. Fields of boulders and rocks, with countless crawl spaces, cover the valley floor. Two sandy ancient riverbeds, or oueds, one running north to south and the other running east to west, become torrential rivers during the two or three annual rainstorms. The bare rocky hills drive the summer rain straight down into the oueds, where wells can easily reach the water table—the permeable layer beneath the earth’s surface in which water saturates the soil and fills all gaps between rocks. At the north end of the valley, in the middle of the oued, stands a hamlet, Ametettaï—four abandoned stone huts built by nomadic herders. Nearby, in the shade of thorny acacias and fruit trees, four large cavities in the sand, dug by Tuareg nomads to thirty feet, contain ample reserves of water.
In late January, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, Iyad Ag Ghali, and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid dispersed with their jihadi followers into the desert. Belmokhtar retreated to the no-man’s-land along Mali’s border with Algeria, to carry on his campaign of carnage and hostage taking. Ghali fled north from Kidal and may have sought temporary refuge in a mountainous region of Darfur, in Western Sudan. (Other reports placed him in the western Sahara region of Morocco, and the northern desert of Mauritania.) Abou Zeid and at least six hundred fighters from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, including the men who had burned four thousand manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute, retreated to the Ametettaï, where they prepared for a long siege. The fighters buried mines at the valley’s entrance points, camouflaged their pickup trucks beneath acacia trees, set up sniper positions in the hills, and filled caves with food, water, guns, and ammunition. The aim of Abou Zeid and his jihadi cadre was clear: hold out in their rock-walled sanctuaries, outlast the foreigners, force them to retreat from the valley, and live to fight another day.
At the army base in Tessalit, forty-eight miles northwest of the Ametettaï, Barrera devised a three-pronged attack. One battalion from a Chadian expeditionary force—battle-hardened men used to fighting in equally harsh terrain—would enter the valley from the east. A six-hundred-man mechanized battalion, consisting of infantry and armored vehicles, supported by four 120-millimeter mortars and two long-range CAESAR howitzers, would assault from the west. Four companies of troops from the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment, France’s rapid reaction force, would enter from the north. These four companies of Foreign Legionnaires would divide the valley in two, capture Ametettaï village, and cut off the jihadis’ access to water.
On February 22, the Chadian battalion made an initial foray into the Ametettaï through a narrow opening at the valley’s eastern extremity, in armored trucks and on foot. The jihadis were prepared for them. The fervor that they had displayed in Timbuktu—the fanatical certainty that had driven them to declare war on the city’s music, manuscripts, and culture of tolerance—assumed a terrifying new intensity on the battlefield. Suicide bombers, wearing explosive belts filled with steel pellets, threw themselves on patrols at the entrance to the valley. Twenty-six Chadian soldiers were killed and seventy injured in close combat. Helicopters evacuated the dead and wounded, and the weary survivors returned by truck to Tessalit, the U.S.-built base being used as the French command center. They spent three days convalescing. Then they declared that they were ready to reengage. Before dawn on February 25, they joined 1,200 French soldiers for a coordinated assault. “You’re going to fight determined men, men who are dug into strong defensive positions,” Barrera told the troops before they departed. “We are going to suffer losses, but we have to continue fighting.” He gave his men a maximum of six days to take the valley, an even lower figure than his initial assessment. “Beyond that,” he told them, “we will have surpassed our physical limits.”
Captain Raphaël Oudot de Dainville had arrived at Tessalit by troop transport plane from Niger on February 22—the same day that the Chadians died at the eastern entrance to the Ametettaï Valley. A third-generation military man and a 2005 graduate of the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr, considered the West Point of France, Oudot de Dainville was an infantry officer in the French Foreign Legion, comprised of French officers and international recruits. These men, often fleeing from checkered pasts in their home countries and seeking a second chance in life, were legendary for their esprit de corps. The troops under Oudot de Dainville’s command came from England, the Balkans, Poland, Russia, and half a dozen former states of the Soviet Union, and had seen action in the Côte d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, and Afghanistan. He had led his parachutists into the Tagab Valley in Kapisa Province northeast of Kabul in the winter of 2010, where the Taliban had put up a fierce resistance, and where Oudot de Dainville had first confronted the fight-to-the-death ethos of Islamist fanatics. He considered his men to be tougher, more disciplined, and more used to hardship than their French-born counterparts. “They push everything to the extreme,” he said.
Before dawn, Oudot de Dainville and his soldiers climbed into military trucks at Tessalit and headed south through the desert. They bounced on sandbags for ten hours over a moonscape of stones, pebbles, and boulders. At three-thirty in the afternoon, the men dismounted from their trucks in the oued, near the Ametettaï’s northern entrance. Sappers checked for mines buried in the sand. The men walked in a tight formation through the ancient riverbed, wary of ambushes. The temperature was 122 degrees. Each man wore a helmet, flak jacket, and sixty-pound backpack filled with six plastic bottles of water, meals-ready-to-eat (MRE), and ammunition. They carried French-made M4 rifles; antitank missiles, mortar tubes, and disassembled 12.7-millimeter machine guns. The hamlet of Amettetaï was four miles from their point of entry into the valley. In between lurked hundreds of fanatical fighters, including Abou Zeid, the jihadi commander and the scourge of Timbuktu, dug into caves with enough water, food, and ammunition to hold out for weeks.
Moments after Oudot de Dainville and his men entered the Ametettaï, the jihadis opened fire on the troops with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. The parachutists crawled to cover behind boulders. Bullets ricocheted off the rocks and struck flak jackets and helmets. Kevlar vests saved four French soldiers; a bullet lodged between one man’s helmet and his skull. The Legionnaires inched forward, taking advantage of the enemy’s limited visibility, creeping up on the sides of their caves and tossing in grenades. The explosions resonated across the valley. They moved across the stony terrain, taking sniper fire from the hills, sweeping the area for fighters and weapons, tossing in more grenades and moving on.
That night they camped on rocks inside the valley, cushioning themselves as best they could with pieces of cardboard ripped off boxes of mineral water after the bottles had been consumed. Oudot de Dainville bunked down in the middle of his company. Teams of sentries kept watch. The French officer was well familiar with the fate of the French colonial commander Colonel Etienne Bonnier and his column of French and Senegalese troops, who had camped in the Sahara on the night of January 14, 1894, while on a reconnaissance mission after an exhausting thirty-five-mile march from Timbuktu. Tuareg swordsmen and cavalrymen waited in silence until the French sentries dozed off, then, at four a.m., with cries of “Kill them,” charged Bonnier and his men, leaving thirteen French officers dead, as well as a military doctor, a veterinarian, and sixty-six Senegalese infantrymen. Only one French officer had survived. “It was a disaster without precedent in the history of our colonial wars in Africa,” one French officer later wrote. This time French intelligence intercepted radio transmissions from Abou Zeid exhorting his men to wage jihad against “the dogs,” as he called the French—an echo of the call to holy war that the Tuareg warrior chief Ngouna had made against Bonnier on the eve of the massacre. Abou Zeid was rousing his men to jihad from a cave or a crawl space a couple of hundred yards from the French position.
Inching across the stony terrain at sunrise, the Legionnaires made use of technology that their colonial counterparts didn’t have: long-range guns and airpower. Oudot de Dainville’s forward air controller on the ground singled out concentrations of enemy fighters and radioed for support. CAESAR howitzers pummeled the jihadis with 155-millimeter shells that could be fired with accuracy from twenty-five miles away. Mirage jets dropped four-hundred-pound bombs capable of destroying nests of fighters hidden deep underground. Tiger helicopters swooped in low across the battlefield and struck the jihadis with rockets. Abou Zeid could do little else but hunker down and wait out the onslaught.
Barrera and his logistics team worked around the clock to keep the French well supplied and their morale high. Helicopters ferried in ten tons of bottled water daily for the two battalions—an average of two and a half gallons per soldier—enough to ward off thirst and even give them a shower from a bottle once a day. Small perks—a warm Castel beer, cigarettes trucked in from Algeria, a raw onion that they mixed in with their MREs to compensate for the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables—lifted their spirits. Barrera helicoptered back and forth from his command post in Tessalit and spent hours on the battlefield, sometimes sleeping beside his men.
On the 27th of February, after five days of combat, nearing Barrera’s projected limit of French endurance, French artillery and air-burst cluster bombs killed forty Islamist fighters at the eastern entrance to the valley. The air strikes came during a fierce firefight between a cell led by Abou Zeid and the Chadian battalion that had suffered heavy losses five days earlier.
“The French have hit us very badly,” reported one commander in an intercepted radio transmission. “I think the game is up for us.”
That day, the voice of Abou Zeid fell silent.
The massive casualties changed the tenor of the battle. “In the next few days,” Barrera told me, “The morale of the jihadis fell. We could see that they were no longer fighting.”
Two days after the cluster bombardment, Foreign Legion parachutists captured Ametettaï village, the jihadis’ only source of water, without a shot being fired. One company of Legionnaires occupied the stone huts and established a perimeter around the wells. Oudot de Dainville’s company seized the heights above the village. Holed up in their grottos and crawl spaces, the jihadis were now dependent entirely on the water that they had stashed inside. Victory, Oudot de Dainville knew, was just a matter of time.
The battle of the Ametettaï was a lopsided struggle between a modern army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and advanced communications systems, and a ragged band of fanatics who possessed only two advantages, strong defensive positions and a willingness to die for a cause. When their water ran low, they recklessly emerged from their caves in search of fresh supplies. Until now the only enemy combatants the French had encountered face-to-face had been preadolescent runners, employed to carry guns and ammunition between caves. But now desperate groups of fifteen or twenty jihadis charged from their grottos, shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The fighters sometimes advanced to within sixty feet of Oudot de Dainville and his men, then gunfire cut them down.
On March 4, the French Foreign Legionnaires and the Chadian battalion met in the center of the valley and shook hands, their pacification of the Amettetaï complete. The last jihadis had slipped out of the valley in the middle of the night, leaving behind the corpses of six hundred comrades, many blown to bits. The French had suffered only three deaths. Other French forces had simultaneously rooted the extremists out of Gao and out of the Telemsi Valley along the Niger River, a stronghold of Wahhabism where the jihadis had sought refuge.
It had taken only fifty-three days for the French military to largely vanquish a rebel force that had shaken the world and come close to seizing control of a country. The extremists, Barrera said months later, had fought “with courage and tenacity,” but, lacking popular support in the areas that they had controlled, relatively thin in numbers, and forced to make a final stand in a remote and uninhabited corner of the country, the Al Qaeda guerrillas could not withstand a massive assault by a modern European army. The French had not killed every jihadi in Mali, but they had crippled their ability to mount coordinated attacks with large numbers of fighters. The survivors had dispersed into the desert, no longer capable of controlling Timbuktu or any other community in the north.
Operation Serval was hailed almost universally as a model for future interventions—an example of a European nation going into a former colony and efficiently ridding it of a jihadi power, while suffering minimal losses. At the same time, the ease of the French victory underscored the weakness of the Malian armed forces, raising questions about the sustainability of the enterprise. Hollande made it clear that the army had no intention of lingering in Mali, but the fragility of the north suggested the French would find no easy exit. Small jihadi cells were still scattered throughout the desert, the potential for sporadic violence in northern Mali remained high, and for Abdel Kader Haidara and the manuscripts that he had rescued, it was quite likely that there would be no speedy return to Timbuktu.
Oudot de Dainville returned to Tessalit, drank a cold beer, washed his clothes, and took his first shower in two weeks. Then he and his men headed to the Terz Valley, just south of the Amettetaï, to search for jihadis who got away. They found it deserted.
Days later, French troops secretly flew the battered corpse of a jihadi commander recovered from the eastern entrance to the Ametettaï to Algiers and handed it over to Algerian intelligence officials for DNA analysis. Forensic investigators compared the body’s genetic markers with those of two relatives of Abou Zeid, and in late March the French Foreign Ministry announced a definitive determination: the emir of Timbuktu was dead. His killing, declared Hollande, “marks an important step in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel.” He had been the most ruthless and resilient of Mali’s Al Qaeda commanders, and had remained a fanatic to the end. Unlike Ghali and Belmokhtar, who had opted for escape, Abou Zeid had chosen to make a last stand, knowing that his only options were victory or death.
Only one question remained about Abou Zeid: How had he died? A Mauritanian private news agency reported that the AQIM chieftain had been killed in the French artillery and cluster-bomb attack at the eastern end of the valley on February 27. A few weeks after the positive identification in the Algiers lab, however, Paris Match published a photo of a bloodied corpse that appeared to be his, taken on March 2 inside a crawl space beneath a granite boulder. The blood was fresh, suggesting that Abou Zeid had survived the deadly French barrage and fought until the final hours of the jihadis’ resistance. The Chadian soldier who took the photo recounted that, after eight hours of close combat on March 2, the jihadis’ shooting had ended abruptly with a loud explosion at seven in the evening. Abou Zeid had apparently killed himself with a grenade when he realized that there was no way out. His torso was mangled but parts of his body remained intact. Inside a pocket of the diminutive corpse, Chadian soldiers found a French passport belonging to Michel Germaneau, the seventy-eight-year-old aid worker Abou Zeid had executed three years before, following a French commando raid on an Al Qaeda desert camp. The jihadi leader had apparently kept the document as a souvenir of his murder.