Facing the sun as it set over the immense ocean of white sand, the secret door of the Sidi Yahya mosque was built to stand until the very end of time. To enter the mausoleum that lay beyond it, local legend held, would bring disaster to Timbuktu. Then, in the summer of 2012, armed with pickaxes and a bulldozer, Ansar al-Din jihadists tore down the five-century-old mosque and dug up the graves in the courtyard inside. Libraries with thousands of ancient manuscripts were burned down; mausoleums and relics destroyed.
Local residents were forced to assemble in the city’s sun-baked squares to witness the hands of petty thieves being amputated, while women were whipped, raped, and forced into marriages.
“The only thing we recognise is the law of God, shari’a,” announced jihadist commander Omar Hamaha. “Shari‘a is a divine obligation; people don’t get to choose whether they like it or not.”
Even as police and intelligence services warn that the 2024 Paris Olympics face an unprecedented threat from the Islamic State, the real story has passed largely unnoticed. Across the Sahel, the great, semi-arid arc stretching from Mauritania to Sudan and Eritrea and further south into Congo and Mozambique, the Islamic State and other jihadist groups have occupied ever-growing swathes of territory, outlasting counter-terrorism operations mounted by France and the United States.
There is no evidence that the arson that crippled France’s high-speed train network on Friday was carried out by jihadists—but the attacks do demonstrate that even the highest levels of security aren’t impenetrable. The rise of the new caliphate on Europe’s southern front not only poses a long-term terrorism threat but intensified pressure from organised crime cartels and growing flows of refugees.
The blood on the sands
Last week, as Mali prepared to kick off against Israel in the Olympics’ opening soccer match, at least 26 villagers were butchered in the village of Dembo. The killings, coming just days after 21 people were executed by having their throats slit at a wedding celebration, barely registered in global reportage. Four out of 10 terrorism-related deaths, the Institute for Economics and Peace estimated last year, now take place in the Sahel, up from less than 1 per cent in 2007. Foreign jihadists displaced from Iraq and Syria have poured into the region.
The reasons for the disaster aren’t hard to understand. Like in Afghanistan, the Western counter-terrorism was severely under-resourced, with just 5,700 French troops and less than 1,000 Americans operating in an area of over 3 million square kilometres. To make things worse, analyst Nathaniel Powell notes, the West found itself propping up highly corrupt and unpopular regimes.
From the story of Mali, it’s clear the counter-terrorism mission confronted deep, intractable issues. Even though French imperialism promoted secularism, anthropologists Robert Launay and Benjamin Soares have observed, its traumatic impacts led to the growth of what they call an “Islamic sphere”. Fleeing colonial wars, serving as soldiers, recruited as labourers, or as slaves freed to come home, millions were pushed to seek an identity outside of the traditional structure of society.
In the 1930s, anthropologist Mike McGovern has noted, small numbers of Salafists emerged across the Sahel, with a new class of traders using the sect’s far-right message to challenge the syncretic Islam—and political power—of traditional élites.
The government of Moussa Traoré, which took power in a 1968 coup d’état, used Islam as a tool to secure its legitimacy. The military regime of General Amadou Toumani Touré, which overthrew Traoré in 1991, prohibited political parties based on religion, but Islam had secured a firm place in the country’s civic life by then.
Figures like the anti-Islamist Sufi Cherif Ousmane Madani Haidara emerged as religious rockstars, catalysing public anger against corruption. At the other end of the spectrum was Imam Mahmoud Dicko, who refused to condemn the barbarism in Timbuktu.
Among the forces that laid the foundations for the role of religion in Mali’s public life was the Taliblighi Jama’at, a proselytising organisation founded in India in 1926. In 1999, historians Baz Lecocq and Paul Schrijver record, four Pakistani-origin missionaries arrived in Kidal, in north Mali, preaching the Tablighi Jama’at message of new-conservative pietism. The organisation appealed to some Muslims resentful at the growing freedoms of women.
The Talibghi Jama’at was far from universally popular—its Bangladeshi-origin missionaries in Timbuktu were largely ignored, and many Sufi clans in Kidal rejected its message—but it did attract some important recruits.
Key among them was a whiskey-swilling, serial-womanising insurgent commander called Iyad Ag-Ghali. The Tuareg had long fought for independence for their territories, Azawad, and the colourful Ag-Ghali came to be known as “the Lion of the Desert”.
“In the 1990s, if you arrived at Iyad’s door in the mornings and the guard said that he was indisposed, then he had been drinking all night,” Lococq and Shrijver wrote after the fall of Timbuktu. “If you arrive now at his door and the guard tells you that he is indisposed, he has been praying the whole night.”
Black Label and Black Flag
Following 9/11, Mali’s government shut down the Tablighi Jama’at and deported many of its preachers. The jihadist movement, though, began to expand. Faced with growing pressure from the Algerian security services, the jihadist Groupe Islamique Armé, or GIA, retreated into the Tuareg territories of northern Mali. There, in 2007, the GIA merged with al-Qaeda. Figures like Ag-Ghali brokered ransoms for Western nationals kidnapped by al-Qaeda and profited from transborder traffic in oil, minerals, and even cigarettes.
Even though the GIA’s Islamism found little support among the Tuareg, Ag-Ghali found reason to abandon his Black Label for the black flag of the jihadists. In 2011, the Tuareg secessionist National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad rejected his effort to become its leader. In response, Ag-Ghali founded a new jihadist organisation called Ansar Dine in alliance with al-Qaeda.
The looming crisis was compounded by the collapse of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in 2011. Thousands of Tuareg mercenaries recruited by Qaddafi to fight his wars returned to Mali, carrying their weapons of war with them. Effete and corrupt, Mali’s armed forces collapsed before them.
Far superior in their organisation and resources, Ag-Ghali’s jihadists turned on the nationalists after the capture of Timbuktu, decimating their one-time allies and pushing south toward the capital, Bamako. Faced with an Afghanistan-like disaster, France stepped in, ordering air strikes against advancing jihadist columns.
The failure of arms
Like in Afghanistan, though, the success proved illusory. French troops, together with regional armed forces, succeeded in dispersing jihadist forces across the Sahel. They lacked the numbers, though, to exercise effective control over the region’s vast geographical expanse. To the 77,000 police, soldiers, and private security personnel guarding the Olympics, Mali had an army of just 7,000. To offset its numerical weakness, Nathaniel Powell notes, France ended up allying with ethnic militia, whose atrocities fuelled resentment among rival communities.
In 2014, France initiated Operation Barkhane, designed to consolidate its military gains by rebuilding state structures. In practice, political scientist Susanna Wing noted, the bulk of aid ended up being spent on developing the security apparatus in northern Mali. To make things worse, corruption ensured aid did little for ordinary citizens and weakened incentives for the élite to develop a productive economy.
The following year, a peace deal was hammered out with the Tuareg insurgents, but little progress was made on implementing its commitment to disarm and reintegrate combatants. The Islamic State and al-Qaeda have adroitly capitalised on the stalemate. Although drone strikes eliminated key leaders, jihadist forces proved resilient.
French President Francois Hollande was bathed in cheers by the people of Timbuktu when he visited the city after the eviction of al-Qaeda. The victory, however, yielded only continued immiseration of the desperately poor country, and war that seemed to have no end. In 2020, when French-backed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was dethroned in a coup d’état, applause greeted the colonels who overthrew him. The regimes of Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali have since turned to Russia and its Wagner Group mercenaries to secure their survival.
Ever since 9/11, the world has known the price that has to be paid for letting jihadists shelter inside imploded nations—but has proved remarkably unwilling to pay what’s needed to genuinely fix the problem.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)