Published in Britain as The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu; William Collins; £20 TOMBUT. Tenbuch. Tombouctou. Timbuktu.
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Her most popular album was "Timbuktu Tarab," released in 2010.
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There is little gold to be found in Timbuktu today.
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The road to Timbuktu Author and journalist Nicholas Jubber paints a remarkable picture of steely determination and true grit in new book "The Timbuktu School for Nomads: Across the Sahara in the Shadow of Jihad".
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But I mean I might as well have been in Timbuktu.
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She was freed about 10 days later and returned to Timbuktu.
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The film depicts the occupation of Timbuktu by jihadis in 2012.
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One election official was killed in northern Niafunke, in Timbuktu region.
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This campaign began after UNESCO named Timbuktu a endangered world heritage site.
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The jihadist leader admitted to ordering attacks on Muslim shrines in Timbuktu.
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For the next 10 months, Timbuktu would be governed by Shariah law.
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He also said that ballot materials for another village Berre, remained in Timbuktu.
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Hammer delights in the explosion of medieval scholarship that took place in Timbuktu.
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From 2009 to 2013, Camara, a native of Mali, photographed manuscripts in Timbuktu.
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In THE TIMBUKTU SCHOOL FOR NOMADS (Nicholas Brealey, $25.95), his passionate paean to the Sahara ("a rumpled carpet of fire"), he describes his journey via "bus, boat and occasionally donkey cart" from Fez to the azalai's starting point at Timbuktu.
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Life becomes awful in Timbuktu, with brutal sharia punishments meted out by young soldiers.
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A resident of Timbuktu who knows Stockly told Reuters she had again been abducted.
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Caption: Footage of Islamist militants destroying a historical monument in Timbuktu on July 1, 2012.
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At one time tourists used to pour into Timbuktu to ride camels across the desert.
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The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save its Past.
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Perhaps that describes the case of Mr Mahdi, who was not an outsider to Timbuktu.
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Hammer estimates that the intellectual patrimony of Timbuktu now amounts to a staggering 377,000 manuscripts.
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Several French soldiers were wounded last week in an al Qaeda mortar attack in Timbuktu.
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The animals live in an unforgiving landscape southeast of Timbuktu, enduring sandstorms and blistering temperatures.
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For 224 months, Islamist fighters occupied places like the fabled mud-walled city of Timbuktu.
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A bestseller, it made Timbuktu the talk of literary Europe, but Park never reached the city.
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A resident of Timbuktu who knows Stockly told Reuters it was she who was kidnapped overnight.
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Seven people were killed when unidentified gunmen attacked a U.N. peacekeeping base in Timbuktu this week.
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THE STORIED CITYThe Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its PastBy Charlie EnglishIllustrated.
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You just might even discover you have a long lost half-sister who now lives in Timbuktu.
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We're told not only does the moola have to be right, the location can't be in Timbuktu.
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The people of cities like Timbuktu, Gao and Djenne have preserved those manuscripts through successive foreign invasions.
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In the 1300s, the most esteemed universities in the world attracted scholars to Gao, Timbuktu and Djenne.
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Mali, and in particular the Timbuktu region, is one of the world's deadliest postings for UN peacekeepers.
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All but one of the structures were part of the Timbuktu world heritage site recognized by Unesco.
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Presently, they've mapped around 60 sites including Lalibela in Ethiopia, Timbuktu in Mali and Kilwa in Tanzania.
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"Often the distances are far and therapists do not want to come out to Timbuktu," she explained.
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You could start with the 2014 film "Timbuktu," about how jihadists come to a small village in Mali.
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Just as the fight is brewing, a world-renowned music festival in Timbuktu welcomes Bono to the stage.
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Most of the destroyed tombs in Timbuktu have been rebuilt using traditional masonry methods, financed by foreign donors.
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The rebels had invaded the cities of Gao and ancient Timbuktu and would occupy them for 10 months.
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Four vehicles were used in the kidnap, said a military source in Timbuktu who declined to be identified.
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THE STORIED CITY: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, by Charlie English.
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Man faces war crimes charges for destroying Timbuktu monuments The maximum sentence that Mahdi could face is 30 years.
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An Islamist rebel admitted to destroying religious artefacts in Timbuktu, Mali, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
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THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts, by Joshua Hammer.
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They and hundreds of others had fled Mali just before the announced arrival of the French forces in Timbuktu.
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Twenty-four hours after he arrived in Timbuktu, Mali, Mr. Gustafsson was taken hostage from his hotel at gunpoint.
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On June 26, Mr. Gustafsson, now 42, returned to Sweden, the second of the "Timbuktu Three" to be freed.
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Timbuktu, renowned throughout the Muslim world as an intellectual centre, was founded by a Tuareg family in the 12th century.
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Islamists accused her of proselytizing for Christianity and warned her that she would be executed if she returned to Timbuktu.
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There's the Maasai beadwork, the Basotho blankets, the lip plates, the architecture inspired by ancient buildings from Timbuktu and Mali.
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It also went after institutions housing documents from the Middle Ages in Timbuktu, which was founded in the fifth century.
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Destabilization in Libya had spread south and with it Tuareg rebels, backed by Islamic militants, who claimed Timbuktu in 2012.
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Jihadists have made near daily attacks against U.N. peacekeepers and Malian troops around cities like Timbuktu in the desert north.
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A Reuters reporter said it was calm in Timbuktu on Sunday after days of unrest leading up to the polls.
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Officials from the agency under Operation Timbuktu rescued 104 Nigerian girls from three brothels in Bamako, Mali's capital in 2011.
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In a separate incident, an unidentified gunman shot three people dead outside a Christian radio station in Timbuktu in December.
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Still, Mr. Haidara told them, the manuscript operations had to remain secret, since many privately owned collections remained in Timbuktu.
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This shipment contained roughly half of the 22,2500 that still needed to be removed from Timbuktu, the Dutch were told.
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The images inspired the movie "Timbuktu," directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
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The Security Council members met with local government officials as well as civil society and religious leaders in Mopti and Timbuktu.
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Prosecutors allege that Faqi also helped lead the Islamic Court of Timbuktu that was established by Ansar Dine during its siege.
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In 2015 six UN troops were killed and five others injured in an attack on their convoy in the Timbuktu region.
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" Also, Joshua Hammer writes of the extraordinary attempt to protect endangered texts in Mali in "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.
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In a formal statement last month, Mr. Mahdi said he regretted his actions and begged the people of Timbuktu for forgiveness.
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The so-called Nightingale of the North, Khaira Arby, allays her sadness by planning a return concert in her beloved Timbuktu.
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Start with that incomparable name: Timbuktu, a three-syllable chime that forms a virtual do-re-mi of hiddenness and exoticism.
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In 2011, Stephen McGown, now 42, was on vacation in northern Mali when he and three other tourists were kidnapped from Timbuktu.
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In Kano, a village 60km east of Timbuktu, the UN shows off what its DDR (disarmament, demobilisation and rehabilitation) programme has achieved.
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Perched on the outer reaches of European knowledge, Timbuktu powerfully captured what Edward Said, a Palestinian-American scholar, called the "Orientalist" imagination.
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A more immediate salve was the sound of music once more on the streets of Timbuktu, previously banned under the Islamist regime.
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Opposition leader Cisse, who voted in his village, Niafounke in the Timbuktu region, said that in Dianke, ballot boxes were taken away.
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McGown was taken hostage while on vacation in Timbuktu, northern Mali, along with Swedish national Johan Gustafsson and Dutch national Sjaak Rijke.
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But she resisted her father's orders to stop singing and joined Malian musical troupes in the northern cities of Timbuktu and Gao.
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The incredible story — also told recently in Joshua Hammer's "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" — has a few gaps in this rendition.
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The tourist, Stephen Malcolm McGown, 42, was the last of the "Timbuktu Three," who were abducted in late 2011, to be released.
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In 2012, jihadist groups conquered Timbuktu and other towns in the north of Mali, imposing a regime of terror on the population.
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The Malian town of Timbuktu lies at the point where the lifeblood of West Africa, the River Niger, bends into the Sahara.
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Youba Cisse, a trader in Timbuktu, told Reuters he heard at least three loud detonations coming from the direction of the camp.
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If Timbuktu used a better magnetic closure like the one found on Peak Design's Backpack I could whole-heartedly recommend the Robin Pack.
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Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi pleaded guilty at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to the destruction of several cultural heritage sites in Timbuktu.
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Faqi, who at his first appearance at the ICC in September described himself as a graduate of Timbuktu teachers institute, denies the charges.
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Earlier this year Timbuktu seemed to quieten down, but violence and lawlessness has been on the rise again in the last few months.
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It also essentially makes the point that these illegal spy files could end up in Timbuktu and you'd be none the wiser. 20193.
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The inaugural 31 members include Facebook Network Investor Lead Ibrahim Ba, former AfriLabs head Tayo Akinyemi and Timbuktu Capital Management investor Ousmane Diagne.
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Malian forces launched "Operation Martine" last month to secure the area around Timbuktu, including two forests thought to be used as militant hideouts.
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Bultemeier's vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser that belonged to the Embassy, was recovered in Timbuktu, and Cheibani's fingerprints and DNA were found inside.
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" Arriving in Timbuktu, he felt "like an outlaw spirited into a forbidden city — Luke Skywalker driving into Mos Eisley with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
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A South African tourist abducted nearly six years ago in Timbuktu, Mali, by the North African branch of Al Qaeda has been freed.
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Mahdi was sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in attacking nine mausoleums and one mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012.
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Caption: The International Criminal Court recently closed a trial against Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi for destruction of cultural heritage sites in Timbuktu, Mali.
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In 2012, Islamist fighters in northern Mali kidnapped Beatrice Stockly, a Swiss woman working as a missionary in Timbuktu, and released her days later.
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"Everyone feels that a big step has been made and thinks that peace will now come," Timbuktu resident Moulaye Haidara told Reuters by telephone.
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Maiga's itinerary includes other locations in the north and center that have been affected by rebellion or Islamist insurgency, including Gao, Timbuktu and Mopti.
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The spices, minerals, animals, fabrics and books carried into Timbuktu in the Middle Ages give a heady taste of what the city once was.
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The wide-ranging music selection on Timbuktu radio was replaced by uninterrupted Koranic verse, women were forced behind veils, men made to grow beards.
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In a landmark August 2016 decision against an extremist in Timbuktu, the International Criminal Court ruled the destruction of cultural heritage a war crime.
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While other cities, including Timbuktu and Gao, were liberated and briefly enjoyed a return to normalcy, Aguelhok always remained in a state of insecurity.
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That morning, the mayor of Timbuktu, Halle Ousmane Cissé, told journalists that the jihadist occupiers of the town had destroyed its famous literary heritage.
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She says Timbuktu regularly receives emails, letters, and messages from parents thanking the book's creators for helping to create "profound" moments with their children.
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Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, co-founders of the children's media company Timbuktu Labs, felt this longing firsthand and decided to do something about it.
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The coalition had total control of Timbuktu, setting up Islamic courts and other functions, until January 2013, when French troops intervened and the militants fled.
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AT THE weekly market in Toya, at the edge of the Niger river, just outside the ancient city of Timbuktu, little seems to have changed.
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In Timbuktu Mohammed Ag Atta, a 52-year-old Tuareg, says that a decade ago he made good money guiding tourists out into the desert.
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After the Ansar Dine Islamist rebel group took control of Timbuktu, civilians "were subjected to a climate of constant fear and repression," Bensouda told judges.
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From court filings, although some are heavily redacted, a picture emerges of a man who was known and liked in Timbuktu as an Islamic scholar.
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Filling out Mr. Mahdi's portrait, they said he was from Timbuktu, where he had worked as a teacher and was known for his religious knowledge.
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In the second incident, residents in Timbuktu said that rockets were fired overnight at the airport there but landed outside the perimeter, without causing damage.
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The militants are far from defeated, with one group even managing to kidnap the politician who leads Mali's main opposition party last week near Timbuktu.
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Nasir had made a vast collection of manuscripts redolent of the private libraries of Timbuktu that Al Qaeda-allied fighters tried to destroy in 2013.
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According to Mr. Haidara, the private evacuation had moved 377,491 manuscripts in almost 2,500 lockers, which represented more than 95 percent of the Timbuktu manuscripts.
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Most of the shuttered polling stations were in the Timbuktu region and the conflict-hit central region of Mopti, Security Minister Salif Traore told reporters.
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In London, Dr. Genge studied one of the gathered particles — from Norway, not Timbuktu — and confirmed that it was indeed a traveler from outer space.
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"They came, they fired their weapons and then they took the ballot boxes away," witness and Timbuktu resident Insubdar Inaboud, 42, a bus conductor, told Reuters.
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In 2017 fellow Ansar Dine member Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi pleaded guilty to the destruction of cultural heritage for his participation in smashing Timbuktu mausoleums.
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He first sees the new mosque on a visit to Timbuktu before the war, when he also spots American special forces drinking beer in the heat.
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While Europe was still groping its way through the dark ages, Timbuktu was a beacon of intellectual enlightenment, and probably the most bibliophilic city on earth.
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Islamist militants briefly held Timbuktu, an ancient trade and cultural hub, in 2012 and other northern towns until French forces drove them out a year later.
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After a French-led military force recaptured Timbuktu the next year, some of the jihadists disappeared and others appeared to receive amnesty under a peace deal.
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In Arkodia, a village in the northern region of Timbuktu, a local election official was shot to death by extremists during the voting, local officials said.
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When a branch of Al Qaeda captured northern Mali in 2012, militants used pickaxes and bulldozers to destroy the ancient mausoleums of Sufi saints in Timbuktu.
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The north came under rebel control while Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb capitalized on the subsequent power vacuum and took over Timbuktu for a time.
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Despite a 2015 peace accord in Mali, United Nations peacekeepers stationed in the region have been attacked several times, including an episode on Monday in Timbuktu.
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There has been some attention paid to the 2012 case of iconoclastic destruction of a medieval shrine in Timbuktu, brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
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Johan Gustafsson, 42, was kidnapped in November 2011 in Timbuktu, during a motor cycle trip in Mali, along with two people from South Africa and the Netherlands.
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Three people were killed last week in the western region of Timbuktu, known for harboring Islamist militants, after French troops fired warning shots at a suspect vehicle.
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Ansar Dine was a local affiliate of al-Qaeda that worked closely with AQIM and joined Tuareg rebels to launch an attack on Timbuktu in April 2012.
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The documentary starts with a tour of Timbuktu, Mali, under the occupation of jihadists in 2012 and ends with propaganda images of the Islamic State last year.
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A notable exception was Abderrahmane Sissako's "Timbuktu," an Oscar nominee last year that was released in the United States a few weeks after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
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A new museum has been opened with UNESCO's help in Gao in Mali; another will open soon in Timbuktu, says Salia Malé, director of Mali's National Museum.
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It follows the trial of jihadist Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, who pleaded guilty Monday to destroying religious monuments in the ancient city of Timbuktu in Mali.
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The media are beating the drums of war, preparing the American people for major conflict, whether it's in Syria, North Korea, or Timbuktu for all we know.
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Gustafsson, 42, was kidnapped from a restaurant in Timbuktu while on vacation in Mali in 2011 along with South African Stephen McGown and Dutch national Sjaak Rijke.
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They returned to Gao and Kidal two weeks later, but some armed groups prevented them from setting up in Timbuktu and Menaka at the beginning of March.
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In the latest sign of the growing dangers, a Swiss missionary was kidnapped from Timbuktu last week in the first known abduction of a Westerner since 2013.
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Its triumphs include designating world heritage sites such as the Galapagos Islands and the historic tombs of Timbuktu — re-built by UNESCO after Islamist militants destroyed them.
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The trial of the radical Islamist Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi in the International Criminal Court over the destruction of the religious sites in Timbuktu was another.
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TOM KELLY SEATTLE ⬥ Those Librarians To the Editor: How did Simon & Schuster get away with calling Joshua Hammer's book "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" (May 1)?
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We are currently reading Joshua Hammer's "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" and "The Fat Man From La Paz: Contemporary Fiction From Bolivia," edited by Rosario Santos.
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ABIDJAN, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Unidentified gunmen overran a military camp near Timbuktu in northern Mali early on Saturday, killing at least 14 soldiers, two army officers said.
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Timbuktu, once a Sahara desert tourist spot, is unstable, hit by Islamist militants as well as tensions between Arab and Tuareg traders and black Malians from the south.
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A veteran jihadist called for a return to Islamic sharia law at a recent meeting attended by hundreds of locals near Timbuktu, an AQIM video showed this week.
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Founded in the fifth century, Timbuktu rose to prominence in the 15th and 16th centuries as a center of Islamic learning and helped the spread of Islam across Africa.
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BAMAKO (Reuters) - Gunmen attacked a checkpoint southwest of the Malian town of Timbuktu overnight killing three soldiers and wounding two others, a soldier in the town said on Wednesday.
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A separate attack took place against MINUSMA in Douenza, around 130 miles south of Timbuktu on Monday, killing one peacekeeper and one Malian national soldier, according to the agency.
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In the summer of 1826, a Scotsman named Alexander Gordon Laing became the first European to set foot in Timbuktu, a city that would become synonymous with mysterious remoteness.
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However, residents have in recent weeks voiced concern that militants from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb known to operate in remote areas near Timbuktu are infiltrating the city.
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Judges in the Hague sentenced this radical Islamist, Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, to nine years in prison for his role in demolishing historic Muslim shrines in Timbuktu, Mali.
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This includes school-based health programs in the Andes, mobile phones to support student learning in South Africa, saving cultural heritage in Timbuktu, and promoting women's literacy in Afghanistan.
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A number of foreigners remain hostage in the Sahel region, including a Swiss woman and a South African-British dual national, both seized in separate attacks in Timbuktu, Mali.
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The takeover of northern Mali between 2012 and 2013 by radical Islamist forces got a powerful fictionalized treatment in the widely acclaimed 2014 film "Timbuktu," directed by Abderrahmane Sissako.
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The International Criminal Court sentenced Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi to 9–20163 years in prison for attacking nine centuries-old mausoleums and the Sidi Yahia mosque in Timbuktu.
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The entity damaged nine mausoleums and the ancient Sidi Yahia mosque, which dates from the 15th Century, when Timbuktu was a regional and global trading hub and seat of learning.
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I saw Timbuktu recently … I don't know very much about, honestly, about the Middle East, and yet I've played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures.
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Mali succeeded in restoring interim authorities to its northern cities of Timbuktu and Menaka on Thursday, ending a standoff with armed Tuareg factions that had prevented the transfer of power.
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If Mr. Mahdi had not pleaded guilty, his trial would probably have been a lengthy one, with witnesses brought to The Hague from Timbuktu and other West African desert cities.
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Coons was the first to raise the issue of the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Timbuktu because of the historic importance of the manuscripts of the medieval universities and libraries.
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Last August, five MINUSMA security guards, one member of the Mali National Police and one civilian contractor working for MINUSMA were killed during an attack on MINUSMA headquarters in Timbuktu.
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From the smashing of mud-brick shrines in Timbuktu to the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar, assaults on cultural heritage have become a depressingly common feature of contemporary conflict.
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The court's ruling on Thursday also suggested that some of the money could be used for a memorial or some other commemoration or community program for the residents of Timbuktu.
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Known as the "City of 333 Saints", Timbuktu was a trading hub and spiritual center by the 14th century, playing a key role in the spread of Islam across the continent.
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On Saturday, a group of around 30 heavily armed fighters attacked a military camp in Soumpi, located in the center of the country near the southern boundary of Mali's Timbuktu region.
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Mahdi, believed to be a member of al Qaeda affiliate Ansar Dine in Mali, pleaded guilty to war crimes for destroying religious and historic monuments in the ancient city of Timbuktu.
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"Non à la Charia à Tombouctou", a contemporary textile-and-embroidery work by Abdoulaye Konaté, a Cuban-trained artist from Mali, shows the skyline of Timbuktu with a sword hovering above.
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Ali Farka Touré entranced listeners with his superposition of different melodies on the guitar; in 1994 he won a Grammy for "Talking Timbuktu", a collaboration with Ry Cooder, an American musician.
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In March 2012, briefly combining forces with Tuareg rebels fighting for an independent homeland and armed with weapons from the collapsed Libyan regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi, they descended on Timbuktu.
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In August 2017, five MINUSMA security guards, one member of the Mali National Police and one civilian contractor working for MINUSMA were killed during an attack on MINUSMA headquarters in Timbuktu.
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This small exhibition focuses on series of photographs by Akinbiyi, Ananias Léki Dago, and Seydou Camara, three artists who explore the urban landscape of Bamako, Cairo, Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, and Timbuktu.
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Related: Militants Overrun UN Base in Timbuktu in Latest Attack in Mali The MINUSMA has been stationed in northern Mali since June 2013 and now has more than 11,700 peacekeepers there.
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At the end of March 2012, Timbuktu was overrun by a coalition of heavily armed rebels, many of whom had recently returned from fighting the Libyan regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi.
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The threat to the collections was extreme, diplomats were told: The French action had angered the occupiers of Timbuktu, who had ordered that the city's manuscripts be gathered together on Jan.
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The renewed fighting in the north meant the land route from Timbuktu was now too dangerous; instead, Mr. Haidara and Ms. Diakité told their donors, the couriers would use the Niger.
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The claim that the jihadists had threatened to burn all the documents during the festival of the Prophet's birthday also seemed shaky; no one I interviewed in Timbuktu recalled this moment.
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On Sunday the EU mission said the voting had passed peacefully for the most part, although it had no monitors in Mopti, Kidal and Timbuktu regions due to the security threat.
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No one was hurt this time around as the two or three rockets exploded outside the U.N. "Super Camp" in Timbuktu and a nearby French base, an army spokesman told Reuters.
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BAMAKO (Reuters) - A woman kidnapped overnight from a house in the northern Mali town of Timbuktu is a Swiss citizen, a spokesman for the Malian army, Souleymane Maiga, told Reuters on Friday.
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Gunmen attacked a U.N. peacekeeping base in Mali's northern city of Timbuktu on Monday, the peacekeeping mission said, adding that it had deployed a rapid response force with helicopters to the scene.
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BAMAKO (Reuters) - Gunmen attacked a United Nations peacekeeping base in the northern Mali city of Timbuktu on Monday, officials said, killing seven people, including five Malian security guards, a gendarme and civilian.
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Why ISIS destroys antiquities Timbuktu's treasure trove Using pickaxes and iron bars, Ansar Dine destroyed tombs of historic religious figures as well as institutions housing documents from the Middle Ages in Timbuktu.
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Judges sentenced Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of an Al Qaeda–linked jihadist group, to 9–11 years for attacking nine centuries-old Muslim shrines and a mosque in Timbuktu.
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In one incident, suspected Islamists in six four-wheel vehicles opened fire on a military patrol vehicle in Mboukari, in the remote northern Timbuktu region of Mali, two military sources told Reuters.
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BAMAKO, Jan 8 (Reuters) - A European woman was kidnapped overnight from a house in the northern Mali town of Timbuktu, a spokesman for the Malian army, Souleymane Maiga, told Reuters on Friday.
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The nine shrines that were destroyed and the mosque in Timbuktu that was damaged by the "morality brigade" that Mr. Mahdi led have already been rebuilt with the assistance of foreign donors.
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A South African tourist who was abducted nearly six years ago from an inn in Timbuktu, Mali, by the North African branch of Al Qaeda has been freed, officials said on Thursday.
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The lineup also includes "Abderrahmane Sissako: Beyond Territories" (screening on Friday), a documentary about the Mauritanian-born director of the Oscar-nominated "Timbuktu," and a retrospective screening of "Black Sun" (on Sunday).
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Though it generally focuses on human rights violations, the ICC charged the leader of the jihadist group, Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, with a war crime for destroying cultural artifacts in Timbuktu.
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If right now, as we speak, an AI doctor in Timbuktu discovers a new disease or a new treatment, this information is immediately available to my personal AI doctor on my smartphone.
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AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - An Islamist fighter caused irreparable damage to Africa's cultural heritage by destroying religious sites in the ancient city of Timbuktu during the 2012 conflict in Mali, international prosecutors said on Tuesday.
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"The mausoleums of saints and mosques of Timbuktu were an integral part of the religious life of its inhabitants and constitute a common heritage for the community," the ICC wrote in a statement.
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The same bag of pasta might cost 250 CFA francs ($0.50) in Timbuktu and about 800 CFA francs ($1.50) in Senegal or some of the posher parts of Bamako, the capital of Mali.
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In a statement, the French army said the attack on Thursday morning targeted the MINUSMA peacekeeping force in Timbuktu, close to a French unit operating as part of a separate counter-terrorism operation.
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She said she had recently seen the Jordanian film "Theeb," about a Bedouin boy on a hazardous mission in the desert, and also "Timbuktu," about Islamist militants taking over the fabled Malian city.
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For Bruce Hall, a professor at Duke University who lived in Timbuktu for several years while conducting research, the giant claims being made about the evacuation of the private libraries were red flags.
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The most fascinating part of the Timbuktu tale is that the doubts and distortions surrounding the 21st-century "Indiana Jones moment" mirror the myths that have arisen about the city throughout its history.
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BAMAKO/PARIS (Reuters) - Homemade rockets shook the northern Mali city of Timbuktu on Sunday near U.N. and French military bases where Islamist militants launched a deadly suicide raid last weekend, France's army said.
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In "The Storied City", Charlie English, a veteran journalist for the Guardian, traces how the European idea of Timbuktu took shape through the "West's centuries-long struggle to find, conquer and understand the city".
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THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Monday asked judges to approve war crimes and crimes against humanity charges against a man suspected of committing atrocities in Timbuktu in Mali.
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Adama Yalomba has been an on the verge of greater fame Malian musician since his performance in the immortal Desert In The Festival in Timbuktu in 2003 and hopefully this will be his year.
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Mr. Mahdi, who was arrested in Niger in 2014 when French troops intercepted a jihadist convoy, was the only one of the senior leaders in the takeover of Timbuktu to end up in court.
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Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of a jihadist group linked to Al Qaeda, was sentenced to nine years in prison for organizing the destruction of centuries-old Muslim shrines in Timbuktu, Mali.
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And despite the criticism, African countries cooperate with the court: Niger handed over Mr. Mahdi, the Islamic extremist, and it was the Malian government that asked the court to investigate the events in Timbuktu.
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And when Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda briefly seized the city of Timbuktu in Mali in 2012, they demolished centuries-old Sufi mausoleums and libraries, several of which were UNESCO world heritage sites.
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She would send her itinerary to her Friends and Family List, so that if she were singing in Vienna or Sydney or Timbuktu and someone from home happened to be there, they could connect.
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There were no city residents staying at the base, which lies near the entrance of Timbuktu, and a Nigerian police contingent had reportedly been in charge of the site, a military source told Reuters.
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Officially known as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Paris-based UNESCO is best known for designating and protecting archaeological and heritage sites, from the Galapagos Islands to the tombs of Timbuktu.
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Cisse's bodyguard was killed and two others wounded when unidentified gunmen ambushed the group on Wednesday afternoon between villages in the northern region of Timbuktu, the Union for the Republic and Democracy (URD) said.
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A French-led military force recaptured Timbuktu the next year, and Mr. Mahdi was later arrested in Niger and, at Mali's request, sent to the International Criminal Court, which is based in The Hague.
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BAMAKO (Reuters) - Armed men kidnapped a Swiss missionary from her home in Timbuktu on Friday, nearly four years after she was abducted by Islamist militants from the same house, Malian and Swiss authorities said.
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Diarran Kone, said that after the attack in the Timbuktu region, the bodies of 17 assailants were left at the scene and the base was once again under the control of the Malian military.
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"There's a place called Agouni, just north of Timbuktu in the desert, and I met a lot of people from there who [...] had their flocks taken, rustled, their medical supplies, their equipment stolen," he recalls.
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Sure, you can go to Lithuania or Pakistan or Timbuktu and find someone who can get the job done, but that's no replacement for in-house talent — and without a good team, you're basically nowhere.
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The great Timbuktu manuscript exodus may have been more prophylactic than urgently necessary, but it was a remarkable achievement, nonetheless, bringing together international funders, a network of smugglers and a handful of dedicated local curators.
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PARIS — International prosecutors on Tuesday laid out charges in their first case involving Islamic extremism, accusing a jihadist from Mali of destroying historic Muslim shrines in Timbuktu that were protected as a World Heritage Site.
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Reports by Arab and European travellers often contradict one another, so Gomez ingeniously synthesizes them with archeological evidence, manuscripts in Timbuktu libraries, and local tradition, to give a granular view of life in the region.
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She said she had recently seen the Jordanian film "Theeb" about a Bedouin boy on a hazardous mission in the desert, and also the film "Timbuktu" about Islamist militants taking over the fabled Malian city.
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A group of around six militants drove up to the U.N. base in the former Hotel Palmeraie at the entrance to Timbuktu at dawn and detonated a car bomb before holing up inside, security sources said.
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JOSHUA HAMMER'S new book, "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu", traces the story of hundreds of thousands of medieval texts as they are rescued in 2012 from near-destruction by jihadists linked to al-Qaeda in Mali.
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BAMAKO (Reuters) - Malian troops backed by U.N. helicopters stormed a U.N. police base in the city of Timbuktu and recaptured it from suspected Islamist militants who had seized it hours before on Friday, the United Nations said.
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He joined Ansar Dine, the Islamist group allied with the North African affiliate of Al Qaeda known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as the groups overran Timbuktu and other places in northern Mali in 2012.
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The result is a classic nonfiction braid that reinforces his central point: that Haidara's Indiana Jones-style work to save the hippocampus of the Songhay kingdom is just one more incredible tale in the continuum of Timbuktu.
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"This is Azawad and, Allah willing, it will be Islamic, and we will not give it up to the enemy," Talha al-Azawadi said at a community gathering at Boujbeha, north of Timbuktu on an unspecified date.
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Related: Militants Overrun UN Base in Timbuktu in Latest Attack in Mali According to documents obtained for this story, the Army, National Guard and the Air Force have all sent special operators for consecutive training in Senegal.
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The video, which outlined the conditions for the release of Beatrice Stockly, a Swiss missionary who was based in Timbuktu, is the latest indication of deteriorating security in Mali's north just months after a peace accord was signed.
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"With the application of the peace agreement, the people will be able to feel the dividends of peace," Francois Delattre, France's ambassador to the United Nations, said during a trip to the northern towns of Timbuktu and Mopti.
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AlsterPlus: Ultra Powerful USB-C Battery Pack — $239.99 See Details No matter where you are — home, abroad, Timbuktu — you'll be able to juice up all of your laptops, smartphones, and game consoles with the Omnia P274 Wall Charger.
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A group of around 30 heavily armed fighters attacked the military camp in Soumpi, located in the center of the country near the southern boundary of Mali's Timbuktu region, according to an army statement read on state radio.
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Leo Africanus, a north African traveller of obscure origin, put Timbuktu on Europe's intellectual map with "Descriptions of Africa", a florid account of his journey from what is now Tunisia to the gold-trading kingdoms of west Africa.
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PARIS — The International Criminal Court ruled on Thursday that an Islamist extremist who pleaded guilty last year to destroying shrines and damaging a mosque in the ancient city of Timbuktu, Mali, was liable for damages of $3.2 million.
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I'd love for the people who are watching my show, in Paris or Milan, New York or any other fashion capital, to be able to understand it just as well as someone in Mumbai, Timbuktu or Kansas City.
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The book compiles fairy-tale-like biographies of 100 real-life women including Amelia Earhart, the Brontë sisters and Cleopatra; the authors published it themselves (through their company, Timbuktu Labs) with money they raised from Kickstarter last year.
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Islamist militants took over northern cities like Timbuktu in 2012 on the back of a Tuareg rebellion, imposing Sharia law with harsh penalties like cutting off fingers for smoking, until France intervened a year later to push them back.
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Running alongside Mr English's lively telling of the quest for Timbuktu is a thrilling account of a more recent story: the daring evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Timbuktu's manuscripts by its librarians during the jihadist occupation in 2012.
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"I confirm that the terrorist Alhousseyni Ag Assaleh, in charge of logistics for...the group run by Amadou Koufa was arrested on 8 July during a joint operation with Barkhane in the Timbuktu region," General Salif Traoré told Reuters.
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After various AQIM affiliates swept across northern Mali in 2012, seizing nearly half the country, intervention by the French and several African militaries pushed them out of cities such as Timbuktu and Gao and back into remote desert regions.
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Judges at the International Criminal Court ruled this week that a former Islamist rebel jailed for wrecking holy sites in the ancient city of Timbuktu during the same period was liable for damages of 2.7 million euros ($3.2 million).
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Filmed partly in refugee camps and on the war-ravaged streets of Timbuktu and Gao, Johanna Schwartz's miraculously hopeful documentary, "They Will Have to Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile," delivers a vibrant testimony of resilience under oppression.
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The nearness of Timbuktu — still 52 days away by camel, one sign read — which was the epicenter of trade and culture on the trans-Saharan caravan route and a fabled name in the Western imagination, was palpable in M'Hamid.
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"Contributions are intended for the poor and to build mosques but are often diverted in the wrong direction," said Bakary Sambe, director of the Timbuktu Institute and a coordinator for the Observatory on Religious Radicalism and Conflicts in Africa.
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In the latest sign of worsening violence in Mali, gunmen abducted a Swiss missionary from her home in Timbuktu this week nearly four years after she was taken hostage as militants seized major urban centers with the help of Tuareg rebels.
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A former trainee teacher accused of damaging monuments in the name of Islam in the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu will stand before the International Criminal Court on Tuesday for a hearing to decide if he should face a landmark trial.
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The rates of global acute malnutrition, the less threatening form, among children in the conflict-hit northern areas of Gao and Timbuktu have risen this year to above 15 percent, exceeding the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.
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So getting together in Davos helps me to prioritize coverage for our three-dozen columnists at Reuters Breakingviews who are tasked every day with making sense of global markets, economies and corporate finance for financial professionals from Toronto to Timbuktu.
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So, if anything, it's proof there was no collusion," he said in an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation," adding that Mueller's team "can investigate from here to, you know, to Timbuktu, and they're not going to find a darn thing.
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BAGUINEDA, Mali (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When rice farmers started producing yields nine times larger than normal in the Malian desert near the famed town of Timbuktu a decade ago, a passerby could have mistaken the crop for another desert mirage.
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In 2016, the International Criminal Court — to which the United States is still not a party — completed its first successful cultural war crimes prosecution, when a Malian extremist pleaded guilty to having demolished a mosque in the ancient city of Timbuktu.
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Ahmad al-Faqi al-MahdiSeptember 27, 20023 - Islamic militant Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi is sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading guilty to war crimes for destroying religious and historic monuments in the ancient city of Timbuktu, Mali.
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Everyone knows about ancient Egypt, but here we also learn about the Iron Age kingdom of Axum (also rendered Aksum) south of Egypt; the 13th-century libraries of Timbuktu; the development of Zanzibar into an intercontinental trading hub; and much more.
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Destroying antiquities at heritage sites like the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra and the shrines of Timbuktu in Mali has increasingly become a tactic of war for groups like Islamic State, both to feed propaganda and profit from smuggling, the United Nations says.
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BAMAKO/TIMBUKTU (Reuters) - The party of Malian presidential candidate Soumaila Cisse said on Monday that the poll would go to a run-off between Cisse and President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a day after a vote that was heavily disrupted by suspected Islamist gunmen.
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TIMBUKTU, Mali (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council traveled to northern Mali on Saturday to push for implementation of a fragile peace deal aimed at ending a cycle of internal uprisings and allowing the government to combat the growing threat of Islamist militants.
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THE HAGUE (Reuters) - A Tuareg Islamist rebel charged by the International Criminal Court with desecrating priceless monuments in the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu has told judges he wishes to plead guilty to the war crimes charges he faces, the ICC's prosecutor said.
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Editorial The use of cultural destruction as a weapon of war gained new recognition last week when the International Criminal Court handed down a nine-year sentence to a radical Islamist for his role in destroying shrines in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012.
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The Timbuktu shrines, brick and mud structures built from the 15th to 17th centuries atop the graves of Muslim scholars, are modest in comparison with the massive Buddha statues destroyed in Afghanistan or the Roman ruins demolished by the Islamic State in Syria.
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PARIS — An Islamic extremist pleaded guilty on Monday at the International Criminal Court to destroying shrines and damaging a mosque in the ancient city of Timbuktu, Mali, in the court's first prosecution of the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime.
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Mr. Mahdi, a teacher who was born in or around 1975 near Timbuktu and who studied Islamic law in a Saudi-sponsored school in Libya, was also accused of leading a "morality brigade" that meted out punishments like public floggings for minor infractions.
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Unknown assailants attacked and withdrew inside a United Nations police base in the Malian city of Timbuktu on Friday morning, the United Nations said, with the morning assault coming on the heels of recent attacks on foreign entities in Mali and West Africa.
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No one has claimed responsibility for Friday's attack, but Islamist militants, who briefly held the city of Timbuktu in 2012 until French forces drove them out, have stepped up activities in Mali in recent months as part of a growing regional insurgency.
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Since 2009, he has focused his attention on the desert city of Timbuktu, shooting, close-up, some of the many thousands of ancient manuscripts stored there in madrasas and homes, survivors of the political turmoil that engulfed the city two years ago.
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When Qaeda fighters in northern Mali destroyed the tombs of Sufi saints in Timbuktu, the group's emir in the region sent them a multipage reprimand, warning that even though they were correct in principle, their actions could inflame Muslim sentiment against them.
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In 2013 a French military intervention pushed the Islamic militants back, and Ms. Arby led an effort to hold the first concert in Timbuktu, her home city, which was still shellshocked from the rebel invasion and a bloody intervention by the Malian military.
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Charlie English, a former international editor of The Guardian with a movie-perfect foreign correspondent name, tells this story of contemporary Timbuktu combined with alternating chapters about the mania among 19th-century European Orientalists to be the first to "discover" the lost city.
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Situ Research On Wednesday, judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, found Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, a member of an extremist group with connections to Al Qaeda, guilty of the destruction of nine mausoleums and a mosque door in Timbuktu.
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"An attack has been launched against one of our camps in Timbuktu (by) unknown men with machine guns," Radhia Achouri, a spokeswoman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission, said earlier by telephone, adding that it had deployed a rapid response force with helicopters to the scene.
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GAO, Mali (Reuters) - Armed protesters from Mali's Arab community fired shots into the air, burned tyres and torched vehicles in Timbuktu on Wednesday, bringing the desert city to a standstill days before an election seen as a test of stability across the country, officials said.
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That ancient literary heritage, and the threat it faces from radical Islam, is the subject of Joshua Hammer's book "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu," part history, part scholarly adventure story and part journalistic survey of the volatile religious politics of the Maghreb region.
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The hero of Hammer's story is Abdel Kader Haidara, inheritor and protector of a uniquely fine manuscript collection, a gentle, scholarly man who began gathering manuscripts in the 1980s on behalf of the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research in Timbuktu.
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PARIS — Judges at the International Criminal Court ordered a radical Islamist on Tuesday to serve nine years in prison for his role in demolishing historic Muslim shrines in Timbuktu, Mali, in the court's first prosecution of the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime.
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His months of reporting in Mali allow him to reconstruct vivid scenes, such as that of a night parley between a Timbuktu militia and the rebel command on a rug set before a corral of 4x4 vehicles in which the only light came from cigarettes.
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In 2016, the International Criminal Court sentenced Malian militant Ahmed al-Faqi al-Mahdi to nine years in prison for his role in the destruction of ancient sites in Timbuktu when a rebel group with links to al-Qaeda captured the city in 2012.
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Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud is being held at the Hague on charges of crimes against humanity on the basis of gender and religion, and war crimes including rape, sexual slavery, and torture during the takeover of Timbuktu by Islamic militants in 2012.
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In the mud-walled medieval city of Timbuktu, once a flourishing tourist spot before Islamist militants made it too dangerous, witnesses said gunmen had intimidated voters, seized ballot boxes and in some cases set fire to them in the few polling stations that were attacked outside town.
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The hearings involving Mr. Mahdi, the first jihadist to appear before an international court, have thrown additional light on events in Timbuktu during its occupation by jihadists, and on a defendant about whom little was known until Niger handed him over to the court last year.
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Human rights activists have said that women and girls were particular targets of the extremists' abuse in Timbuktu, including rape, forced marriage and sexual slavery, and that Mr. Mahdi's brigade was complicit in that abuse; they have requested that the court expand the charges against him accordingly.
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"The ethnic cleansers in the Balkans, like the jihadis in Iraq, Syria and Timbuktu and other places, are keenly aware of the significance of this, which is why they devote so much personnel and resources to the destruction of religious and cultural landmarks," Mr. Riedlmayer said.
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For what it may have lacked in appearance, Timbuktu earned a kind of redemption through its libraries, which brimmed with thousands of documents from a golden age of African civilization that put the lie to Western disparagements of a continent free of any non-oral history.
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But English deals with the inconsistencies in a transparent way — even if a bit late in the game — and, curiously, it even fits perfectly into the ongoing narrative of Timbuktu, a place where the magnificence of the tale can occlude the plain facts of what's there.
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Morse code operators, in the interest of economizing their keystrokes, also developed a shorthand that can still be observed today by listening in on the conversation between any two ham operators, such as: NC1M DE AA5.53JD GA DR OM UR RST 5NN HR QTH TIMBUKTU OP IS MATT HW?
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But the razing of medieval shrines in Timbuktu by Malian jihadists in 2012 and then the destruction by Islamic State militants in Syria of parts of the ancient city of Palmyra last year brought the danger home, said Bokova, among candidates to become UN Secretary General later this year.
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The Islamists' control of Timbuktu focused on wrecking the ancient Sufi shrines, mounting public amputations and boasting on Twitter; the finer points of the city's cultural heritage didn't seem to interest them, and as Hammer acknowledges, the manuscript collections were "mostly ignored" until the final stages of the occupation.
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Prosecutors in The Hague said that Mr. Mahdi had led the razing of 10 shrines around Timbuktu, a town on the southern edge of the Sahara that gained prominence as an ancient trading crossroads and a vital center of Islamic learning from the 15th century to the 17th century.
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Some of the films have been hugely popular in their homeland, like Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now, Sophie Boutros' Mahbas; others, like Ziad Doueiri's The Insult, Hany Abu Assad's Omar, Jehane Noujaim's The Square, Naji Abu Nowar's Theeb and Abdulrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu were nominated for an Oscar.
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"I was scared to come and vote because of the insecurity, but I feel relieved because everything went well," said 26-year-old housekeeper Mariam Cisse in the northern medieval Islamic city of Timbuktu, whose mud-walled mosques were tourist attractions until it became beset by Islamist militancy in 2012.
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The suspect, identified by the ICC as Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, was indicted for crimes allegedly committed as de-facto chief of Islamic police in Timbuktu in 2012 and 2013 including destroying cultural monuments and enforcing policies that led to sexual enslavement of women and girls.
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Islamic extremist Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was held liable for €2.7 million (~$3.2 million) in damages by the International Criminal Court for the destruction of nine centuries-old mausoleums and the Sidi Yahia mosque in Timbuktu — the first such ruling by the court for an act of cultural destruction.
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Known as the "Nightingale of Timbuktu" and the "Diva of the Desert," Ms. Arby was a celebrated singer and recording artist from a nation that has produced a number of musicians with global reach, among them the guitarist and songwriter Ali Farka Touré, with whom Ms. Arby performed in concert.
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The original Timbuktu shrines, brick and mud structures built from the 15th to 17th centuries atop the graves of Muslim scholars, were modest in comparison with the massive Buddha statues destroyed in Afghanistan and the Roman ruins demolished by the Islamic State in Syria and uncounted historical sites in Iraq.
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In a sense, the court was being asked to adjudicate between different readings of the Muslim faith: between one which regarded the shrines, and the whole surrounding city of Timbuktu (pictured), as a cherished monument to the spread of Islam in Africa, and a more puritanical view which regarded such structures as idolatrous.
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The ICC alleges that Al Hassan was the de facto chief of the Islamic police after the takeover of one of the world's oldest cities and that he participated in the policy of forced marriages, which led to the repeated rape and sexual enslavement of women and girls in Timbuktu and the surrounding region.
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The man, Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of a jihadist group linked to Al Qaeda, took part in the smashing of a number of centuries-old mud and stone buildings holding the tombs of holy men and scholars in 2012, when members of his group seized Timbuktu and other parts of northern Mali.
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To walk into such a facility with stage 4 metastatic disease is to walk back in time to the world of the unmapped human genome, when "colon cancer" was understood to have a single cause instead of millions of causes resulting in unique variations, when treatment was the same bag of poison, whether you were in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, or Timbuktu.
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Charlie English's "The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past" tells the story of the greatest threat this cultural treasure has faced in seven centuries: the city's occupation in 2012 by a band of Al Qaeda-backed rebels with a sacred charge to eliminate all historical memory of any Islam that did not conform to their austere variety of Wahhabism.
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SAHEL LIBYA ALGERIA Africa MALI MAURITANIA NIGER Timbuktu Gao SENEGAL Niamey Bamako BURKINA FASO GUINEA NIGERIA CôTE D'IVOIRE Gulf of Guinea 300 miles By The New York Times France now finds itself stuck in the Sahel, much like the United States found itself in Afghanistan and Iraq — spending years and billions of dollars on fighting highly mobile Islamist groups in difficult, unfamiliar terrain, with no end in sight.
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Eventually, they landed on Timbuktu and Koro, a pair of patterns whose geometric shapes were inspired by the jutting silhouettes of Malian mosques, as well as two finely engraved rotary prints: Regency Swirl, which evokes the curlicues of wrought-iron fencing, and Stencil Leaf, whose densely packed fronds pay homage to the sprawling topiary at the Arts and Crafts-style garden of Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, England, close to where Lytle grew up.
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Dozens of these (advertising, among others, Angela Lansbury in "Gypsy," Eartha Kitt in "Timbuktu!" and Twiggy in "My One and Only") adorn a lower floor at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where Mr. Knight had arrived, dapper in pinstripes at 90, to give a tour of "Hilary Knight's Stage Struck World," devoted to his many eclectic creations and muses and curated by David Leopold with considerable input from the subject.
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Nonetheless, some African leaders have called the court an instrument of modern colonialism, noting that all of those convicted have been Africans: Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord who conscripted child soldiers; Germain Katanga, a Congolese militia leader, an accomplice to war crimes; Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Congolese politician, found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and — this week — witness tampering; and Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of a Qaeda-linked jihadist group, who destroyed holy sites in Timbuktu, Mali, and was convicted of destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime.
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