Destructive jihadist begs forgiveness
A former jihadist begged for forgiveness on Monday and warned other Muslims not to follow his ‘‘evil ways’’ after pleading guilty to war crimes over the destruction of religious shrines in the city of Timbuktu.
Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi is the first person to face trial at the International Criminal Court on the charge of destruction of cultural heritage. He is accused of intentionally directing attacks against nine of Timbuktu’s mausoleums and the Sidi Yahia mosque during the city’s takeover by jihadists allied to al-Qaeda in 2012.
Al-Mahdi addressed his fellow countrymen as he entered his guilty plea, saying: ‘‘I seek their forgiveness and I ask them to look at me as a son who lost his way.’’
He is the first defendant ever to confess his crimes to the ICC and the first Islamist to face trial there.
Al-Mahdi said that he wanted to ‘‘give a piece of advice to all Muslims around the world not to get involved in the same acts I got involved in because they are not going to lead to any good for humanity’’.
The destruction of the monuments prompted a global outcry and galvanised efforts to have such acts prosecuted as war crimes. Fatou Bensouda, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, told the court in the Hague: ‘‘Such deliberate attacks on cultural property have become actual weapons of war.’’
Irina Bokova, the head of Unesco, which designated Timbuktu a world heritage site, called the attacks there ‘‘a mark of a genocidal project’’.
Timbuktu was founded between the 5th and 12th centuries and became famed as a centre of Islamic learning in the 15th century. Its libraries held thousands of precious manuscripts, the vast bulk of which were smuggled out as jihadists closed in on the city in 2012, but about 4,000 were burnt.
Al-Mahdi, a former civil servant with the Malian government, served as the head of the Hisbah, or religious police, for Ansar Dine, a militant movement allied with al-Qaeda.
Video shown in the courtroom showed al-Mahdi and his fellow jihadists hacking at the tombs with pickaxes, spades and bulldozers. In an interview, he justified the destruction as being in line with ‘‘heavenly Sharia’’.
Al-Mahdi is alleged to have ordered the attacks out of frustration at local people’s refusal to stop worshipping at the shrines and carrying out ancient rites such as prayers for rain or fertility. He called such acts idolatrous. He told the court that he had been caught up in an ‘‘evil wave’’ and disavowed his actions. He faces up to 20 years in jail and the judge warned the maximum penalty could be imposed. ‘‘It is my hope that the years I will spend in prison will be a source of purging the evil spirits that had overtaken me,’’ al-Mahdi told the court.
The charges against him were the result of a joint effort by Bokova and Bensouda to pursue cultural destruction as a war crime to deter acts of deliberate vandalism such as the blowing up of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001 and Islamic State’s destruction of the ancient city of Nimrud in Iraq last year.