Priceless Documents Survive Violence in Timbuktu
Thursday, January 31st, 2013January 31, 2013
Scholars and historians around the world expressed relief at the news that the overwhelming majority of ancient manuscripts threatened by the Islamist militants occupying the Malian city Timbuktu were not destroyed as the militants were driven from the city by French and Malian troops earlier this week. The manuscripts, some of which date back to the 1100′s, were written when Timbuktu was one of the richest commercial cities of Africa and a center of Islamic learning, chiefly from the 1300′s to the 1600′s. Several thousand of the 300,000 manuscripts were apparently stolen or burned by the fleeing militants, who torched a government-funded institute for the study and conservation of the manuscripts. However, the vast majority of the manuscripts had been stored in another building or had been spirited from the institute, according to a report today on the website time.com. It is likely that they were moved for safekeeping when the rebels began vandalizing historic sites in the fabled city. The insurgents are known for their extreme cruelty and barbarity. After taking control of Timbuktu, they destroyed a number of historic and religious landmarks, claiming the landmarks were idolatrous.
The government of French President François Hollande announced on January 12 that it was sending troops into Mali to help wrest the nation back from Islamic jihadist expansion. (Mali was once a French colony.) Some 1,900 African troops–including soldiers from Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo–are being deployed to Mali as part of a United Nations-backed African intervention force to drive the insurgents northwards into the desert and mountains. The United Kingdom is supplying planes to transport troops and material.
Islamist rebels gained control of much of the north in 2012 after a military coup in Mali’s capital, Bamako, created a power vacuum. At the core of the Islamist insurgency are the remnants of a now-defunct Algerian rebel group that was largely driven out of Algeria and into the unpoliced desert land in northern Mali sometime after the Algerian civil war was settled in 1999. A loose alliance of Algerian and Mauritanian fighters, they are believed to be connected to an al-Qa’ida offshoot known as “al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb.” (Maghreb refers to northern Africa west of Egypt). The group aims to overthrow the Algerian government and institute an Islamic state under Shar’iah law. The group operates in Algeria, Mauritania, Niger, and other ungoverned areas of the Sahel region.
Additional World Book articles:
- Algeria 1991 (a Back in Time article)
- Algeria 1992 (a Back in Time article)
- Algeria 1999 (a Back in Time article)