An Islamic extremist accused of destroying religious monuments in the ancient city of Timbuktu will be tried for war crimes in a groundbreaking case at the international criminal court this week.

Ahmad al-Mahdi, a former junior civil servant in Mali’s department of education, joins the ranks of the world’s most notorious dictators and warlords in being tried by the ICC. His alleged crimes, however, are not those usually dealt with by The Hague’s prosecutors: the destruction of small mausoleums made from mud in the middle of the desert.

Mahdi’s lawyer has said his client will plead guilty to directing the destruction of nine mausoleums and a mosque when the trial starts on Monday; it would be the first time an ICC defendant accused of war crimes has entered a guilty plea.

Mahdi’s trial is the ICC’s first for destroying cultural heritage, something that its chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, has called “a callous assault on the dignity and identity of entire populations, and their religious and historical roots”.

Timbuktu is slowly turning to dust, but was once known as the city of gold for its great wealth. Despite being a byword for the end of the earth, the city was a centre of learning, knowledge and culture on par with Florence during the Italian renaissance. Its university had 25,000 students, more than Timbuktu’s estimated current population of less than 15,000, and its libraries held hundreds of thousands of precious manuscripts from the 12th-16th centuries.

Islamist militants destroying an ancient shrine in Timbuktu. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

In 2012, Tuareg rebels attacked Timbuktu, backed by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and armed with weapons from Libya. They enforced sharia law, banning music – the lifeblood of Malian culture – forcing women to wear the burqa and preventing girls from attending school.

Mahdi, who is from a village 62 miles (100km) outside Timbuktu, is accused of having joined the jihadis, who were trying to hire locals to build their credibility, and leading the vice squad.

He was no stranger to Timbuktu. Mahdi met his wife, got married and trained as a teacher in the city. According to magazine Jeune Afrique, a former colleague remembers him as quiet and polite, but that, as a Wahhabi, he refused to look into her eyes or shake hands with any woman.

His alleged orders were to attack the shrines of Sufi saints, break down a mosque door that locals believed had to stay shut until the end of the world, and burn priceless manuscripts from Timbuktu’s archive.

UN peacekeepers guard the mausoleum of Alpha Moya in Timbuktu. Photograph: Sebastien Rieussec/AFP/Getty Images

Mohamed Aouini, Mahdi’s defence lawyer, said his client would plead guilty to the crimes. “He wants to be truthful to himself and he wants to admit the acts that he has committed. And he wants to ask at the same time for pardon from the people of Timbuktu and the Malian people,” Aouini told an earlier hearing at the ICC. “He regrets all the actions that he has committed.”

Thanks to Abdel Kader Haidara, a collector and librarian, 95% of the city’s 400,000 manuscripts were secretly smuggled to Bamako, the Malian capital, by boat and car. They are now being painstakingly restored, catalogued and digitalised. Of what was left in Timbuktu, about 4,000 were lost, stolen or burned by the jihadis before they fled in 2013 when French and Malian troops advanced on the city.

A peace agreement was signed in Mali last year, but fighting has continued, particularly in the lawless north, where jihadis and bandits thrive. The UN mission there is the deadliest in the world.

Haidara had spent a decade travelling the region by camel and canoe, buying manuscripts from families: his story is documented in a book by Joshua Hammer. He took a particular interest in manuscripts that showed Islam not as a religion of intolerance, but of humanity and moderation.

This was a key part of Timbuktu’s “extraordinary civilisation”, according to Cynthia Schneider, a scholar of relations with the Islamic world and a former US ambassador.

“The great characteristic of Timbuktu, which is why it’s so important today, was tolerance, plurality and diversity,” she said. “It was a centre of learning, but also, importantly, a centre of inquiry.

“The manuscripts include discussions of human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, good governance, good business practices. And there’s a whole lot of scientific ones, philosophy, literature, music. All of these characteristics that we tend to associate with Western civilisation – all of that was going on in Timbuktu.”

Schneider co-directs Timbuktu Renaissance, a project that aims to foster peace, unity and economic redevelopment in the city, where the economy has crumbled since its main income, tourism, abruptly dried up in 2012.

The tombs of the Sufi saints, who are thought to protect the city against evil spirits, were rebuilt with the help of Unesco.

In a country where people have, in the recent past, been summarily executed, raped and had their hands amputated, some question the significance of what some Malians call the “trial of stones and earth”. However, the destruction of shrines and monuments has become a hallmark of Islamic extremism, with many statues, mosques, churches and tombs being attacked in Iraq and Afghanistan.



Irina Bokova, the director general of Unesco, said attacks such as these were “a mark of a genocidal project” as they amounted to the attempted annihilation of the other. “I hope that the trial will have a tremendous deterrent effect – a deterrent to Isis and others,” Schneider said, adding that it was important for the people of Timbuktu that Mahdi had admitted to his crimes.

Although not particularly architecturally beautiful, the small mud shrines are key to the identity of Timbuktu, Schneider said, recalling what the city’s imam told her after the attacks. “When they destroyed our tombs, they destroyed our souls,” he said.