The political situation stabilized again, when on April 1, 2013, French warplanes helped Malian ground forces chase the remaining rebels out of the city center. The causes of this diminution are mostly to do with terror attacks in 20 by Islamist groups that declared the region around Timbuktu an independent state, which led to people fleeing the region. While the population in Mali steadily increased around 3% per year, the population level in Timbuktu shrunk from the above mentioned 54,453 inhabitants in 2009 to 32,460 inhabitants by 2018. In addition, Timbuktu was until 2012 the storing place of many thousand invaluable manuscripts. Timbuktu is today the site of medieval mosques, shrines, a university (madrasa), and UNESCO made it a cultural heritage site in 1988. In 2009, Timbuktu as a city had a population of 54,453, about the same as it had in the 16th century, a time of great prosperity. Its capital is Bamako, a city roughly 1000 miles in the south-west of Timbuktu. Mali is a landlocked country with today roughly 18.5 million inhabitants. In Mali's North, Timbuktu is on the south end of the desert Tanezrouft, one of the most desolate parts of the Sahara. Timbuktu is today the administrative headquarters of the sixth region (of eight) of the Republic Mali in West Africa. The other is just the kind of vandalism that goes with uneducated barbarians that I have seen these people to be.Figure 1: Timbuktu (the red flag) in Mali, Africa: google maps, April 5, 2019. You know, we're getting out of here, let's do maximum damage to whatever we can in the city. So there must have been destruction of the building out of spite. They talk of legal issues, social history of the region you have basic mathematics texts and some fairly advanced scientific text."Īsked about the motivation for destroying the library, Jeppie said: "The most beautifully illustrated and illuminated are the old Qurans," he told Morning Edition, adding that there were also "prayers and grammar, and text that would've been used in the educational system in the informal classes held at the feet of teachers and so on. ![]() Shamil Jeppie, who teaches at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, was familiar with the library's contents. Kuwait and South Africa are among the countries that have contributed funds to the building, and a new structure was completed just four years ago. Many are from the 14th to the 16th centuries and were written in Arabic. The institute, which was established in 1973, held some 20,000 manuscripts. ![]() They imposed their rigid interpretation of Islam on the city's residents and had destroyed many cultural and historic sites, include the mausoleums of saints.Īnd in a final act of destruction, they set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute, a library and research center that housed ancient texts, including Qurans and other Islamic works, dating back to the 13th century. The Islamist fighters took control of Timbuktu and much of northern Mali last spring. The mayor was in Mali's capital, Bamako, but was preparing to return to his home city after the Islamist radicals fled Timbuktu in the face of advancing French troops who are assisting Mali's government. ![]() They are close to my heart, and they belong to the whole world," the mayor said. ![]() They are documents about Islam, history, geography, botany, poetry. "These priceless manuscripts are my identity, they're my history. The mayor of Timbuktu, Halle Ousmane Cisse, summed up his feelings in an interview with NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton on Morning Edition: These photos from Timbuktu, Mali, on Tuesday confirmed what many had feared: Ancient books and texts at a famed library were torched by Islamic radicals before they fled. 31: New reports from Timbuktu indicate that " most manuscripts were saved."
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