| Mali’s Ansar Dine rebels destroy Timbuktu sites |
BAMAKO Al Qaeda-linked rebels in Mali armed with Kalashnikovs and pick-axes began destroying prized mausoleums of saints in the Unesco-listed northern city of Timbuktu on Saturday in front of shocked locals, witnesses said as a senior US official urged a political solution in Mali and warned of the risks of a proposed African military intervention to solve the country’s overlapping crises.
The Ansar Dine group backs strict sharia, Islamic law, and considers the shrines of the local Sufi version of Islam idolatrous. Sufi shrines have also been attacked by hardline Salafists in Egypt and Libya in the past year.
The attack came just days after Unesco placed Timbuktu on its list of heritage sites in danger and will recall the 2001 dynamiting by the Taliban of two 6th-century statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan.
“They have already completely destroyed the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmoud (Ben Amar) and two others. They said they would continue all day and destroy all 16,” local Malian journalist Yeya Tandina said by telephone of the 16 most prized resting grounds of local saints in the town.
“They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks. The population is just looking on helplessly,” he said, adding that the rebels were currently taking pick-axes to the mausoleum of Sidi El Mokhtar, another cherished local saint.
The Mali government denounced “this destructive fury comparable to war crimes and is about to take action against the perpetrators on both a national and international level.”
Located on an old Saharan trading route that saw salt from the Arab north exchanged for gold and slaves from black Africa to the south, Timbuktu blossomed in a 16th-century Golden Age as an Islamic seat of learning, home to priests, scribes and jurists.
Mali had in recent years sought to create a desert tourism industry around Timbuktu but even before April’s rebellion many tourists were being discouraged by a spate of kidnappings of westerners in the region claimed by Al Qaeda-linked groups.
Unesco’s World Heritage Committee said this week it had accepted the request of the Malian government to place Timbuktu on its list of endangered heritage sites.
“The Committee ... also asked Mali’s neighbours to do all in their power to prevent the trafficking in cultural objects from these sites,” it said of the risk of looting.
Agencies
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