Timbuktu rebuilds aftermilitants’ rule
The city is reconstructing its shrines a year after al-Qaedawas driven out.
timbuktu, mali » Timbuktu, the centuries-old Malian center of Islamic learning on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, is rebuilding after Islamist militants razed some of its most revered shrines built in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Reconstruction is taking place brick by brick, asworkers use banco, amixture of mud and straw, to restore 14 of the 16 mausoleums destroyed or damaged by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar Dine, or “defenders of the faith.” Those two groups follow Islam’s Salafi movement that regards the practices of the Sufis in Timbuktu as sacrilegious.
“We have witnessed the destruction, we are nowseeing the start of the reconstruction,” said the imam of the Djingareyber mosque, Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti, as he went to attend Friday prayers this month. “To us, it is a new birth for Timbuktu.”
Themilitantswere driven out ofwhat’s knownas theCity of the 333 Saints in January last year after a 10-month occupa- tion. The city, 438 miles north of the capital, Bamako, is protected by France’s Serval intervention force, United Nations peacekeepers and Malian troops and police. The last attack on Timbuktu occurred Sept. 28, when a suicide bomber struck the Malian military barracks.
“By rebuilding these monuments, we will destroy thework of the jihadists,” said Andrzej Bielecki, the European Union’s political counselor, at a March 14 conference atTimbuktu’sAhmedBaba Institute of Higher Learning and IslamicResearch.
So far, $3 million of the $11 million needed for the four-year rebuilding project has been raised, said Lazare Eloundou, representative to Mali of theU.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Timbuktu is generally peaceful today, residents say. Refugees from neighboring Mauritania and Burkina Faso are returning to judge whether security has improved, said Aboubacrime Cisse, president of the council onTimbuktu localities. In the meantime, rebuilding work goes on.
“It is a great honor for us to have this task. The mausoleums have been built by our ancestors, and we will rebuild them following the traditionalway,” said Alassane Hasseye, the head of a bricklaying team. “I cannot find thewords to explain what it does to my heart.”