Beyond the reports of beatings, hand-choppings and other grim Shari’a punishments carried out in the ten months Islamists held the historic Malian city of Timbuktu, the fear that gripped many ...

For centuries, Timbuktu has existed in the Western imagination as a byword for the most exotic, far-flung place conceivable. Situated on the southern edge of the Sahara, it acquired a near ...

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By May, his team had moved tens of thousands of pages of manuscripts from the libraries to safe houses elsewhere in Timbuktu. “We locked them inside rooms, and then we fled to Bamako,” he said.

Towards dusk, a muffled roar escaped from a mud-walled compound on the dusty outskirts of Timbuktu. Inside, Sheik Ould Bekay was issuing orders to half a dozen men who had nearly finished loading a ...

Scrawled on a blackboard inside on a recent day was a drawing of the Timbuktu region, with the words “Islamic Republic” written above. The jihadists’ goal of setting up their own Islamic ...

The air inside is stale, redolent of mildew and earth ... an Islamic scholar from the town of Djenné, migrated north to Timbuktu, then a city of perhaps 100,000 and a religious, educational ...