Again: Islamists Destroy Monuments, This Time in Timbuktu

Al Qaeda-linked Mali Islamists armed with Kalashnikovs and pick-axes destroyed centuries-old mausoleums of saints in the UNESCO-listed city of Timbuktu on Saturday in front of shocked locals, witnesses said.

The Islamist Ansar Dine group backs strict sharia, Islamic law, and considers the shrines of the local Sufi version of Islam to be idolatrous. Sufi shrines have also been attacked by hardline Salafists in Egypt and Libyain 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.

One of the Buddha statues, before and after its destruction.

“They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks. The population is just looking on helplessly,” local journalist Yeya Tandina said by telephone.

Tandina and other witnesses said Ansar Dine had already destroyed the mausoleums of three local saints — Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi El Mokhtar, and Alfa Moya — and at least seven tombs.

“The mausoleum doesn’t exist any more and the cemetery is as bare as a soccer pitch,” local teacher Abdoulaye Boulahi said of the Mahmoud burial place.

“There’s about 30 of them breaking everything up with pick-axes and hoes. They’ve put their Kalashnikovs down by their side. These are shocking scenes for the people in Timbuktu,” said Boulahi.

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Locals said the attackers had threatened to destroy all of the 16 main mausolem sites by the end of the day. UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova called for an immediate halt.

“There is no justification for such wanton destruction and I call on all parties engaged in the conflict to stop these terrible and irreversible acts,” she said in a statement. The sites date from Timbuktu’s Golden Age in the 16th century.

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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.

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