‘City Under Siege’: Timbuktu Residents Live in Constant Fear

ADF STAFF

The sound of gunfire and land-shaking explosions are routinely heard and felt in Timbuktu, the northern Malian city that was once a bustling hub for international tourists drawn to its historic mosques and mausoleums.

Months of violence there prompted Alan Kasujja, who hosts the BBC’s Africa Daily podcast, in August to describe Timbuktu as a “city under siege.”

Timbuktu has experienced more than a decade of war after a 2012 insurrection led by Tuareg rebels. For nearly a year, the city was controlled by extremist groups who enforced strict religious law and destroyed many of the city’s historic sites.

A man who spoke anonymously to the BBC said Timbuktu is his hometown, but nearly nonstop fighting persuaded him to leave. “It’s become a city where you hear gunshots every time, or rockets falling into the city all the time,” the man told the BBC. “Even to travel to another place, the road is unsafe. The hope was the boat, and the boat was hit. Life is very miserable now.”

The man refers to a passenger boat attack perpetrated by the al-Qaida-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) on the Niger River in September. The attack killed 49 civilians, 15 Malian soldiers and dozens of JNIM fighters.

JNIM has tried to completely block trade in Timbuktu since mid-August.

“Dozens of trucks loaded with food and goods used to arrive daily in the city, but now, after the siege, nothing comes,” Omar Sidi Muhammad, a local journalist, told the BBC.

The price of food that used to come to Timbuktu from Mauritania and Algeria has doubled, Muhammad said, adding that items such as sugar, flour, oil and baby formula all were affected.

“There is a scarcity of fuel, and its price has risen by 80%,” he said.

JNIM’s Timbuktu strategy is similar to one it is using in Gao, the largest city in northern Mali, about 320 kilometers east of Timbuktu. Due to JNIM blockades, a lack of fuel now hampers the city’s electricity supply, meaning homes get power for about an hour a day. Trade from Algeria and Niger is blocked, and merchants are leaving.

“People are afraid because of the war,” a man in Gao anonymously told the BBC. “They are not happy with the rise of the food prices. Quite a lot of families have left the city.”

Besides JNIM, the Islamic State group (IS) also operates around the region, as do former rebels, militias, self-defense groups, and Malian forces and their allies, including Russia’s Wagner Group, all of which have “varying objectives and agendas,” Héni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), told the BBC.

According to ACLED, violence against Malian civilians has increased almost 40% this year compared to last year. The violence coincides with the incremental drawdown of United Nations Multidimensional Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) troops. MINUSMA personnel, totaling nearly 13,000, are expected to leave the country by December 31.

“The withdrawal of international forces has more radically reshaped the conflict landscape in Mali,” starting with the French withdrawal of troops in 2022, Nsaibia told the BBC. The withdrawal of MINUSMA, he said, “increases the risks of a more full-blown civil war in Mali and an escalation of conflict in the region.”

Nsaibia said the MINUSAMA withdrawal, ordered by the ruling junta, also risks a fragile peace agreement signed in 2015 between the Malian government and former Tuareg rebels in northern Mali.

The country has become further destabilized since Wagner forces entered Mali in December 2021 after French troops left. The group has targeted civilians during attacks in the Mopti, Koulikoro, Segou and Timbuktu regions, where hundreds of civilians died. This includes the massacre of more than 500 civilians in Moura in the Mopti region in March 2022.

Overall, 71% of Wagner’s engagement in political violence in Mali has taken the form of attacks targeting civilians, according to ACLED. An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Wagner fighters now operate in central and northern Mali.

Wagner has “introduced tactics we have never seen being employed by any other force of the Malian government,” Nsaibia told the BBC. “These include booby trapping, ejection of prisoners from aircraft, especially helicopters. They capture suspects and throw them out in mid-air from helicopters.”