Finalist: Associated Press, by Rukmini Callimachi

TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) -- The convoy of cars bearing the black al-Qaida flag came at high speed, and the manager of the modest grocery store thought he was about to get robbed. 

 

Mohamed Djitteye rushed to lock his till and cowered behind the counter. He was dumbfounded when instead, the al-Qaida commander gently opened the grocery's glass door and asked for a pot of mustard. Then he asked for a receipt. 

 

Confused and scared, Djitteye didn't understand. So the jihadist repeated his request. Could he please have a receipt for the $1.60 purchase? 

 

This transaction in northern Mali shows what might seem an unusual preoccupation for a terror group: Al-Qaida is obsessed with documenting the most minute expenses. 

 

In more than 100 receipts left in a building occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu earlier this year, the extremists assiduously tracked their cash flow, recording purchases as small as a single light bulb. The often tiny amounts are carefully written out in pencil and colored pen on scraps of paper and Post-it notes: The equivalent of $1.80 for a bar of soap; $8 for a packet of macaroni; $14 for a tube of super glue. All the documents were authenticated by experts. 

 

The accounting system on display in the documents found by The Associated Press is a mirror image of what researchers have discovered in other parts of the world where al-Qaida operates, including Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq. The terror group's documents around the world also include corporate workshop schedules, salary spreadsheets, philanthropy budgets, job applications, public relations advice and letters from the equivalent of a human resources division. 

 

Taken together, the evidence suggests that far from being a fly-by-night, fragmented terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a multinational corporation, with what amounts to a company-wide financial policy across its different chapters. 

 

"They have to have bookkeeping techniques because of the nature of the business they are in," said Brookings Institution fellow William McCants, a former adviser to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. "They have so few ways to keep control of their operatives, to rein them in and make them do what they are supposed to do. They have to run it like a business." 

 

The picture that emerges from what is one of the largest stashes of al-Qaida documents to be made public shows a rigid bureaucracy, replete with a chief executive, a board of directors and departments such as human resources and public relations. Experts say that each branch of the terror group replicates the same corporate structure, and that this strict blueprint has helped al-Qaida not just to endure but also to spread. 

 

Among the most revealing documents are the receipts, which offer a granular view of how al-Qaida's fighters lived every day as well as its larger priorities. 

 

"For the smallest thing, they wanted a receipt," said 31-year-old Djitteye, who runs the Idy Market on the sand-carpeted main boulevard in Timbuktu. "Even for a tin of Nescafe." 

 

An inordinate number of receipts are for groceries, suggesting a diet of macaroni with meat and tomato sauce, as well as large quantities of powdered milk. There are 27 invoices for meat, 13 for tomatoes, 11 for milk, 11 for pasta, seven for onions, and many others for tea, sugar, and honey. 

 

They record the $0.60 cake one of their fighters ate, and the $1.80 bar of soap another used to wash his hands. They list a broom for $3 and bleach for $3.30. These relatively petty amounts are logged with the same care as the $5,400 advance they gave to one commander, or the $330 they spent to buy 3,300 rounds of ammunition. 

 

Keeping close track of expenses is part of al-Qaida's DNA, say multiple experts, including FBI agents who were assigned to track the terror group in the years just after its founding. 

 

This habit, they say, can be traced back more than three decades to when a young Osama bin Laden entered King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia in 1976 to study economics, and went on to run part of his millionaire father's construction company. 

 

After he was exiled to Sudan in 1992, bin Laden founded what became the country's largest conglomerate. His companies and their numerous subsidiaries invested in everything from importing trucks to exporting sesame, white corn and watermelons. From the get-go, bin Laden was obsessed with enforcing corporate management techniques on his more than 500 employees, according to al-Qaida expert Lawrence Wright, author of a well-known history of the terror group. Workers had to submit forms in triplicate for even the smallest purchases — the same requirement bin Laden later imposed on the first al-Qaida recruits, he said. 

 

In Afghanistan, detailed accounting records found in an abandoned al-Qaida camp in 2001 included salary lists, stringent documentation on each fighter, job application forms asking for level of education and language skills, as well as notebook after notebook of expenses. In Iraq, U.S. forces recovered entire Excel spreadsheets, detailing salaries for al-Qaida fighters. 

 

"People think that this is done on the back of an envelope. It isn't," says Dan Coleman, a former FBI special agent who was in charge of the bin Laden case file from 1996 to 2004. 

 

One of the first raids on an al-Qaida safe house was led by Coleman in 1997. Among the dozens of invoices he found inside the operative's home in Kenya were stacks of gas station receipts, going back eight years. 

 

This detailed accounting system allows al-Qaida to keep track of the significant sums of money involved in feeding, training and recruiting thousands of fighters. It's also an attempt to keep track of the fighters themselves, who often operate remotely. 

 

The majority of the invoices found on a cement floor in a building in Timbuktu are scribbled by hand, on post-it notes, on lined math paper or on the backs of envelopes, as if operatives in the field were using whatever writing surface they could find. Others are typed, sometimes repeating the same items, in what may serve as formal expense reports for their higher-ups. Al-Qaida clearly required such expense reports — in a letter from the stash, middle managers chide a terrorist for not handing his in on time. 

 

In informal open-air markets such as those of Timbuktu, vendors didn't have receipts to hand out. So, traders say, members of al-Qaida came in pairs, one to negotiate the sale, and the other to record prices on a notepad. This practice is reflected in the fact that almost all the receipts are written in Arabic, a language few residents of Timbuktu know how to write. 

 

The fighters would ask for a price, and then write it down in their Bloc Note, a notebook brand sold locally, said pharmacist Ibrahim Djitteye. 

 

"It surprised me at first," he said. "But I came to the conclusion that they are here for a very specific mission.... And when you are on assignment, you need to give a report. They have their own higher-ups, who are expecting them to account for what they spent." 

 

The corporate nature of the organization is also on display in the types of activities they funded. 

 

For example, two receipts, for $4,000 and $6,800, are listed as funds for "workshops," another concept borrowed from business. A flier found in another building occupied by their fighters confirms that al-Qaida held the equivalent of corporate training retreats. It lists detailed schedules: Early morning exercise from 5 to 6:30 a.m.; lessons on how to use a GPS from 10 to 10:30 a.m.; arms training from 10:30 a.m. to noon; and various afternoon classes on preaching to other Muslims, nationalism and democracy. 

 

A relatively small ratio of the receipts are expense reports for fighters and weapons. One unit presented a politely worded request for funds, entitled: "The list of names of mujahideen who are asking for clothes and boots to protect themselves from the cold." 

 

Far more deal with the mundane aspects of running a state, such as keeping the lights on. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb invaded Timbuktu in April 2012, and took over its state-run utilities, paying to have fuel trucked in from neighboring Algeria. One invoice shows they paid $3,720 for 20 barrels of diesel for the city's power station. 

 

There's also an advance for the prison and a detailed budget for the Islamic Tribunal, where judges were paid $2 per day to hear cases. 

 

Along with the nuts and bolts of governing, it's clear that the fighters were actively trying to woo the population. They set aside money for charity: $4 for medicine "for a Shiite with a sick child," and $100 in financial aid for a man's wedding. And they reimbursed residents for damages, such as $50 for structural repairs, with a note that the house in question "was hit by mujahideen cars." 

 

And it's obvious that the fighters spent a good part of their time proselytizing, with expense reports for trips to distant villages to impart their ultra-strict vision of Islam. One receipt bluntly lists $200 for a "trip for spreading propaganda." 

 

While not overtly explained, the sizable receipts for car repairs suggest regular missions into the desert. The many receipts for oil changes, car batteries, filters and parts indicate the tough terrain battered the fighters' Toyota Land Cruisers. 

 

Finally, the names on the receipts reveal the majority of fighters on the group's payroll were foreign-born. There's a $1,000 advance to a man identified as "Talhat the Libyan." Another is issued to "Tarek the Algerian." 

 

The names furthermore confirm that the top leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb were based in Timbuktu. Among them is Abou Zeid, probably the most feared of al-Qaida's local commanders who orchestrated the kidnappings of dozens of Westerners until his death this spring. 

 

"In the name of Allah, the most merciful," begins a request for funds dated Dec. 29, 2012, and addressed to Abou Zeid. "We are writing to inform you that we need rockets for our camp — a total of 4 is needed. May God protect you." 

 

The extent of the documentation found here, as well as in the other theaters where al-Qaida operates, does not mean the terror group runs as a well-oiled machine, cautions Jason Burke, author of the book "Al-Qaida." 

 

"Bureaucracy, as we know, gives senior managers the illusion they are in control of distant subordinates," Burke said. "But that influence is much, much less than they would like." 

 

Al-Qaida's accounting practices left a strong impression on at least one person in Timbuktu: Djitteye, the convenience store manager. 

 

The al-Qaida commander who came in for mustard was Nabil Alqama, the head of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb's "Southern Command." He became a regular. One day, he asked the store employee to get a receipt book printed so he could provide more official-looking invoices. 

 

Djitteye obliged. 

 

The green receipt book with neat boxes now sits under his cash register. These days, whenever customers come in, he always asks if they would like a receipt. 

 

No one ever does. 

 

___ 

 

The documents can be viewed here: 

 

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/998496-the-multinational.html

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — After years of trying to discipline him, the leaders of al-Qaida's North African branch sent one final letter to their most difficult employee. In page after scathing page, they described how he didn't answer his phone when they called, failed to turn in his expense reports, ignored meetings and refused time and again to carry out orders. 

 

Most of all, they claimed he had failed to carry out a single spectacular operation, despite the resources at his disposal. 

 

The employee, international terrorist Moktar Belmoktar, responded the way talented employees with bruised egos have in corporations the world over: He quit and formed his own competing group. And within months, he carried out two lethal operations that killed 101 people in all: one of the largest hostage-takings in history at a BP-operated gas plant in Algeria in January, and simultaneous bombings at a military base and a French uranium mine in Niger just last week. 

 

The al-Qaida letter, found by The Associated Press inside a building formerly occupied by their fighters in Mali, is an intimate window into the ascent of an extremely ambitious terrorist leader, who split off from regional command because he wanted to be directly in touch with al-Qaida central. It's a glimpse into both the inner workings of a highly structured terrorist organization that requires its commanders to file monthly expense reports, and the internal dissent that led to his rise. And it foreshadows a terrorism landscape where charismatic jihadists can carry out attacks directly in al-Qaida's name, regardless of whether they are under its command. 

 

Rudolph Atallah, the former head of counterterrorism for Africa at the Pentagon and one of three experts who authenticated the 10-page letter dated Oct. 3, said it helps explain what happened in Algeria and Niger, both attacks that Belmoktar claimed credit for on jihadist forums. 

 

"He's sending a message directly north to his former bosses in Algeria saying, 'I'm a jihadi. I deserve to be separate from you.' And he's also sending a message to al-Qaida, saying, 'See, those bozos in the north are incompetent. You can talk to me directly.' And in these attacks, he drew a lot of attention to himself," says Atallah, who recently testified before Congress on Belmoktar's tactics. 

 

Born in northern Algeria, the 40-something Belmoktar, who is known in Pentagon circles by his initials MBM, traveled to Afghanistan at the age of 19, according to his online biography. He claims he lost an eye in battle and trained in al-Qaida's camps, forging ties that would allow him two decades later to split off from its regional chapter. 

 

Over the years, there have been numerous reports of Belmoktar being sidelined or expelled by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. The letter recovered in Timbuktu, one of thousands of pages of internal documents in Arabic found by the AP earlier this year, shows he stayed loyal to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, until last year, and traces the history of their difficult relationship. 

 

The letter, signed by the group's 14-member Shura Council, or governing body, describes its relationship with Belmoktar as "a bleeding wound," and criticizes his proposal to resign and start his own group. 

 

"Your letter ... contained some amount of backbiting, name-calling and sneering," they write. "We refrained from wading into this battle in the past out of a hope that the crooked could be straightened by the easiest and softest means. ... But the wound continued to bleed, and in fact increasingly bled, until your last letter arrived, ending any hope of stanching the wound and healing it." 

 

They go on to compare their group to a towering mountain before raging storms and pounding waves, and say Belmoktar's plan "threatens to fragment the being of the organization and tear it apart limb by limb." 

 

They then begin enumerating their complaints against Belmoktar in 30 successive bullet points. 

 

"Abu Abbas is not willing to follow anyone," they add, referring to him by his nom de guerre, Khaled Abu Abbas. "He is only willing to be followed and obeyed." 

 

First and foremost, they quibble over the amount of money raised by the 2008 kidnapping of Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler, the highest-ranking United Nations official in Niger, and his colleague. Belmoktar's men held both for four months, and in a book he later published, Fowler said he did not know if a ransom was paid. 

 

The letter says they referred the case to al-Qaida central to force concessions in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, a plan stymied when Belmoktar struck his own deal for 700,000 euros (about $900,000) for both men. That's far below the $3 million per hostage that European governments were normally paying, according to global intelligence unit Stratfor. 

 

"Rather than walking alongside us in the plan we outlined, he managed the case as he liked," they write indignantly. "Here we must ask, who handled this important abduction poorly? ... Does it come from the unilateral behavior along the lines of our brother Abu Abbas, which produced a blatant inadequacy: Trading the weightiest case (Canadian diplomats!!) for the most meager price (700,000 euros)!!" 

 

The complaint reflects how al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, initially considered one of the group's weaker wings, rose to prominence by bankrolling its operation with an estimated $89 million raised by kidnapping-for-ransom foreign aid workers and tourists. No less than Osama bin Laden endorsed their business model, according to documents retrieved in the terror leader's hideout in Pakistan. 

 

The letter also confirms for the first time that payments from European governments went directly toward buying arms to carry out attacks against Western targets, as long speculated by experts. The council chides Belmoktar for not following this practice. 

 

"(The chapter) gave Abu Abbas a considerable amount of money to buy military material, despite its own great need for money at the time. ... Abu Abbas didn't participate in stepping up to buy weapons," the letter says. "So whose performance deserves to be called poor in this case, I wonder?" 

 

The list of slights is long: He would not take their phone calls. He refused to send administrative and financial reports. He ignored a meeting in Timbuktu, calling it "useless." He even ordered his men to refuse to meet with al-Qaida emissaries. And he aired the organization's dirty laundry in online jihadist forums, even while refusing to communicate with the chapter via the Internet, claiming it was insecure. 

 

Sounding like managers in any company, the Shura leaders accuse Belmoktar of not being able to get along with his peers. They charge that he recently went to Libya without permission from the chapter, which had assigned the "Libya dossier" to a rival commander called Abou Zeid. And they complain that the last unit they sent Belmoktar for backup in the Sahara spent a full three years trying to contact him before giving up. 

 

"Why do the successive emirs of the region only have difficulties with you? You in particular every time? Or are all of them wrong and brother Khaled is right?" they charge. 

 

The letter reveals the rifts not only between Belmoktar and his superiors, but also the distance between the local chapter and al-Qaida central. The local leaders were infuriated that Belmoktar was essentially going over their heads, saying that even AQIM has had few interactions with the mother brand in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a region they refer to by the ancient name of Khorasan. 

 

"The great obstacles between us and the central leadership are not unknown to you. ... For example, since we vowed our allegiance, up until this very day, we have only gotten from our emirs in Khorasan just a few messages, from the two sheiks, bin Laden (God rest his soul) and Ayman (al-Zawahri)," they write. "All this, despite our multiple letters to them." 

 

Belmoktar's ambition comes through clearly not only in the bitter responses of his bosses, but also in his own words: "Despite great financial resources ... our works were limited to the routine of abductions, which the mujahedeen got bored with." 

 

In another quote, he calls bin Laden and al-Zawahri "the leaders of the Islamic nation, not the leaders of an organization alone. We love them and we were convinced by their program. ... So it's even more now that we are swords in their hands." 

 

To which AQIM replies with more than a hint of sarcasm: "Very lovely words. ... Do you consider it loyalty to them to revolt against their emirs and threaten to tear apart the organization?" 

 

Belmoktar's defection was a long time in the making, and dates back to his time as a commander of Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC. When the Iraq war started in 2003, his ambition created friction between younger Algerian fighters like himself, who wanted to join the global jihad, and an older generation whose only goal was to create an Islamic state in Algeria, according to Islamic scholar Mathieu Guidere, a professor at the University of Toulouse. 

 

The younger faction won, but Belmoktar felt slighted because his contemporary, Abdelmalek Droukdel, was named emir of the GSPC, instead of him. 

 

Soon after, the group petitioned to join al-Qaida. The terror network announced a "blessed union" on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2006. 

 

Both Belmoktar and Droukdel wrote "candidacy letters" to bin Laden asking to be emir, according to Guidere's book on the subject. Again, Droukdel won. 

 

Frustrated, Belmoktar drifted farther south. He set up in the ungoverned dunes of neighboring Mali, took a Malian wife and tapped into the smuggling routes that crisscrossed the Sahara, amassing arms and fiercely loyal fighters who called themselves, "The Masked Brigade." 

 

His fighters killed more than a dozen soldiers at a military garrison in Mauritania in 2005 and gunned down four French tourists there in 2007. On multiple occasions Belmoktar was declared dead, including most recently in March, and each time, he re-emerged to strike again. 

 

The sharpest blow in the council's letter may have been the accusation that, despite this history of terrorism, Belmoktar and his unit had not pulled off any attack worthy of mention in the Sahara. 

 

"Any observer of the armed actions (carried out) in the Sahara will clearly notice the failure of The Masked Brigade to carry out spectacular operations, despite the region's vast possibilities — there are plenty of mujahedeen, funding is available, weapons are widespread and strategic targets are within reach," the letter says. "Your brigade did not achieve a single spectacular operation targeting the crusader alliance." 

 

In December, just weeks after receiving the letter, Belmoktar declared in a recorded message that he was leaving the al-Qaida chapter to form his own group. He baptized it, "Those Who Sign in Blood." 

 

With that name, he announced his global ambition. "Those Who Sign in Blood" was also the name of an Algerian extremist unit that hijacked an Air France flight leaving Algiers in 1994. Though their goal to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris was thwarted, the unit foreshadowed the terrorist vision that led to the fall of the Twin Towers in New York. 

 

On Jan. 11, French warplanes began bombarding northern Mali, the start of a now 5-month-old offensive to flush out the jihadists, including Belmoktar's brigade. Five days later, suicide bombers took more than 600 hostages in Ain Amenas in far eastern Algeria and killed 37, all but one foreigners, including American, French and British nationals. Belmoktar claimed responsibility in a triumphant recording. 

 

It was no accident that he chose Ain Amenas, Guidere said. The area is in the home province of Abou Zeid, Belmoktar's longtime rival who commanded a different Saharan brigade and was always in step with the Algeria-based emirate. 

 

"It's a punch in the gut," Guidere said. "It's saying, 'You've never been able to do anything even in your native region. Watch me. I'll carry out the biggest hostage operation ever in that very region. ... Ain Amenas is the illustration of his ability to do a quality operation, when he is under no authority other than his own, when he doesn't have to turn in expense reports or answer to anybody." 

 

As if to turn the knife even further, last week Belmoktar also claimed responsibility for a May 23 attack at a French-owned uranium mine in Arlit, Niger. It was in Arlit in 2010 that Abou Zeid carried out his boldest operation and seized seven foreign hostages, including four French nationals who are still in the hands of AQIM. 

 

In an apparent attempt to raise the stakes, Belmoktar's men slipped past a truck entering the mine and detonated explosives inside. More than 100 miles to the south, a different unit of fighters under his command killed 24 soldiers at a military camp, with help from another local al-Qaida off-shoot, called the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa. 

 

Jean-Paul Rouiller, the director of the Geneva Center for Training and Analysis of Terrorism, compared the escalation in attacks to a quarrel between a man and a woman in which each tries to have the last word. "They accused him of not doing something," Rouiller said. "His response is, 'I'll show you what I can do.'" 

 

Belmoktar might have seen a certain justice in the coverage of the last week's attack in Niger in the leading French daily, Le Monde. Among the adjectives used to describe the event: "Spectacular." 

 

TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — The love story in this fabled desert outpost began over the phone, when he dialed the wrong number. It nearly ended with the couple's death at the hands of Islamic extremists who considered their romance "haram" — forbidden.

 

What happened in between is a study in how al-Qaida-linked militants terrorized a population, whipping women and girls in northern Mali almost every day for not adhering to their interpretation of the strict moral code known as Shariah. It is also a testament to the violent clash between the brutal, unyielding Islam of the invaders and the moderate version of the religion that has long prevailed in Timbuktu, once a center for Islamic learning.

 

Salaka Djicke is a round-faced, big-boned girl with the wide thighs still fashionable in the desert, an unforgiving terrain that leaves many women without curves. Until the Islamists came and upended her world, the 24-year-old lived a relatively free life.

 

During the day, she helped her mother bake bread in a mud oven, selling each puffy piece for 50 francs (10 cents). In the afternoon, she grilled meat on an open fire and sold brochettes on the side of the road. She saved the money she earned to buy herself makeup and get her hair styled.

 

Like her sisters and friends, she spoke openly with men — including the stranger who called her by mistake more than a year ago.

 

The man thought he was calling his cousin. When he heard Salaka's voice, he apologized. His voice was polite but firm, with the authoritative cadence of a man in his prime. Hers was flirtatious, and her laugh betrayed her youth.

 

They started talking.

 

A few days later, he called her again. For two weeks, they spoke nearly every day, until he asked for directions to her house.

 

She explained how to find the mud house on Rue 141, past the water tower also made of mud, in a neighborhood less than a mile from where he sold gasoline from jerrycans by the roadside. She had time to put on a yellow dress.

 

He arrived on his motorcycle.

 

He was older — she does not know how old — and already married, a status that bears no taboo in a predominantly Muslim region where men can take up to four wives. She found him handsome.

 

From that day on, he ended phone conversations with the phrase, 'Ye bani,' or "I love you" in the Sonrai language. Instead of Salaka, he called her "cherie" — sweetheart in French, still spoken in this former French colony.

 

He showered her with gifts, starting with a 6-yard-long piece of bazin fabric, the hand-dyed, polished cotton which is the mainstay of Malian fashion. It was a royal violet, and he paid to have it tailored into a two-piece outfit, with a flame-like flourish of orange brocade on the bodice.

 

She put it on for him, and they went to the photo studio one street over. They stood against the poster backdrop of an enamel-blue waterfall. He put his arms around her and invited her to sit on his lap.

 

By the time the first group of rebel fighters carrying the flag of the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad drove past her house on April 1, the two had been seeing each other for several months. He called to see if she was OK.

 

These fighters in military uniforms made clear their goal: They wanted to create an independent homeland known as Azawad for Mali's marginalized Tuareg people.

 

Only days later, a different group of fighters arrived, wearing beards and tunics that looked like the kurtas common in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their black flag resembled the one people had seen on YouTube videos posted by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. They called themselves Ansar Dine, or "Defenders of the Faith."

 

They produced a pamphlet outlining how a woman should wear the veil, and whom she could and could not be seen with. Eschewing any contact with women, they handed the leaflets out to the men.

 

One of them was Salaka's boyfriend. He drove his motorcycle to her house to give it to her.

 

She didn't have enough money to buy the plain, colorless veil prescribed to cover the entire body. So her boyfriend went to the market and paid for two, one red and one blue. The women of sub-Saharan Africa are so used to wearing vibrant colors, he couldn't find any that were black.

 

___

 

As their love affair grew more intense, so did the crackdown by the Islamists in northern Mali, an area equal in size to Afghanistan.

 

Three months after they arrived, they arrested an illiterate man and woman, both dirt-poor herders living together for years with their animals outside the town of Aguelhok. The man had left his wife to reunite with his teenage love, and they had two children out of wedlock, the youngest just six months old.

 

In the last week of July, the Islamists sped into their nomadic camp and arrested them. They drove them to the city center, where they announced the couple would be stoned to death for adultery.

 

They dug a hole the size of a man and forced them to kneel inside. They made the villagers come out to see what Shariah was.

 

Then they cast the first stone.

 

__

 

The fear was now palpable on the streets of Timbuktu. Salaka and her boyfriend stopped seeing each other in public. When he came, they sat in the enclosed courtyard of her parents' home, behind the veil of its chrome-red dirt walls.

 

Even in relatively modern Timbuktu, it was not considered appropriate to leave the couple alone in a room. So he arranged for a friend to loan him the keys to his empty house in a neighborhood less than a mile away.

 

Would she please join him there, just for an hour, once a week?

 

She hesitated. He begged her, saying he couldn't be without her. They determined that the Islamic police stopped their patrols at 10 p.m.

 

They began meeting once a week. She insisted on staying no longer than 40 minutes. He brought her on his motorcycle, stopping close to the house and pushing the bike through a blanket of sand to avoid attention.

 

By this time, the Islamists were beating everyone from pregnant mothers and grandmothers to 9-year-olds for not covering themselves fully. A woman was no longer supposed to talk even to her own brother on the stoop of her house.

 

At a certain point Salaka knew they were going to get caught. She planned out what they would say.

 

In one version, she would say he was her uncle. In another she would call him her older brother. In yet another, they would try to pass off as a married couple.

 

On the night of Dec. 31, the two left Salaka's house on a motorcycle, headed west and turned onto Road No. 160.

 

They passed the bread oven belonging to one of her mother's competitors. They skirted an alley crowded with handmade bricks laid out to dry. They turned left, and then right again, taking a circuitous path to confuse anyone who might be following them.

 

When they got close, they chose the narrowest alleyways, used only by motorcycles and donkey carts instead of the Toyota pickup trucks of the Islamic police. They passed the house where they planned to meet and doubled back in an alley. He cut the motorcycle's engine, told her to stay 100 yards behind him and pushed the bike through the sand as usual.

 

She watched him leave. She was breathing so hard she was afraid the stars could hear her. He passed the first intersection, then the second, and then the third.

 

The bearded men came on foot via the third intersection. There were four of them. Her lover jumped on his motorcycle and gunned it across the sand. He was the married one and would have paid the higher price.

 

View galleryIn this Feb. 4, 2013 photo, Salaka Djicke stands at …

In this Feb. 4, 2013 photo, Salaka Djicke stands at the entrance to the women's jail where she was h …

She knew she couldn't outrun them. So she stood. And in the moments it took for them to descend on her, she realized it would be futile to lie.

 

___

 

They took her to the headquarters of the Islamic police, inside a branch of the local bank. They shoved her into the closet-like space where the ATM machine is located and locked the gate behind her.

 

When she didn't come home that night, her worried sister called her cell phone. The Islamic police answered and told her where Salaka was.

 

In the morning, her family came to slip her a piece of bread through the grills of the gate, feeding her like an animal at the zoo. Later that day, the police transferred her to a prison they had set up just for women in a wing of the city's central jail. For the next three nights, she slept alone on a hard floor in a large, cement room.

 

On Jan. 3 they took her to the Islamic tribunal. Just eight days before French President Francois Hollande unilaterally approved a military intervention in Mali on Jan. 11, Salaka was convicted of being caught with a man who was not her husband and sentenced to 95 lashes. It was a severe punishment even by the standards of the Islamists.

 

They took her to the market at noon on Jan. 4, the same place where she bought the beef for the brochettes she sold and the flour used to make her mother's flatbread. She recognized the meat sellers. One of them used his phone to record what happened next.

 

The police made her kneel in a traffic circle. They covered her in a gauze-like shroud. They told her to remove her dress, leaving only the thin fabric to protect her skin from the whip. Curious children jostled for a better view.

 

What they did to her was witnessed by dozens of people in Timbuktu, and can still be heard on the meat seller's cell phone.

 

The executor announced Salaka's crime and her punishment. Then he began flogging her with a switch made from the branch of a tree. Her high-pitched cries are contorted with pain. You can hear the slap of the whip. You can hear her labored breathing.

 

They hit her so hard and for so long that at one point she wasn't sure if the veil had fallen off. She could feel the blood seeping through.

 

When it was over, they told her that if they ever saw her with a man again, they would kill her.

 

Her lover called as soon as she got home. The night she was caught, he ran away to Mali's distant capital, becoming one of an estimated 385,000 people who have fled their homes from the north.

 

He said over and over: "I'm sorry." He promised to marry her. But he has not yet returned. She still will not name him, fearing the Islamist extremists will be back.

 

Her face warms when she speaks of him and contracts when she describes her pain and humiliation. There isn't a child in Timbuktu who doesn't recognize her, she says. Even now she avoids the market, sending her sisters to buy the meat instead.

 

"This was a tyrannical regime, which had no pity towards women," she says. "I'm not the only one that went through this. I did this because I was in love."

 

Last week, Salaka was among the thousands of people who poured into the streets to cheer French soldiers as they liberated the city. She folded and put away her blue and red veils.

 

In recent days, she pulled out her lover's gift of the violet bazin with the flame-patterned brocade from the bottom of a pile of clothes she was not allowed to wear under the city's occupiers. She painted her lips a translucent fuschia. She went to the newly opened hairdresser.

 

The photo studio where she and her lover posed by the cardboard waterfall remains closed, so instead her brother snapped a picture of her.

 

If you look closely, you can see the marks left by the whip across her now-naked shoulders.

 

___

 

Salaka's story was pieced together from interviews with her over three days. Salaka took AP journalists to the rendezvous house, the place where she was arrested, the ATM machine, her prison cell and the market. Her family, city officials and several witnesses confirmed the whipping, and a meat seller shared with the AP a sound recording that captures the sentencing and her screams. The account of the stoning in Aguelhok is from the city's mayor.

 

TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) -- In their hurry to flee last month, al-Qaida fighters left behind a crucial document: Tucked under a pile of papers and trash is a confidential letter, spelling out the terror network's strategy for conquering northern Mali and reflecting internal discord over how to rule the region. 

 

The document is an unprecedented window into the terrorist operation, indicating that al-Qaida predicted the military intervention that would dislodge it in January and recognized its own vulnerability. 

 

The letter also shows a sharp division within al-Qaida's Africa chapter over how quickly and how strictly to apply Islamic law, with its senior commander expressing dismay over the whipping of women and the destruction of Timbuktu's ancient monuments. It moreover leaves no doubt that despite a temporary withdrawal into the desert, al-Qaida plans to operate in the region over the long haul, and is willing to make short-term concessions on ideology to gain the allies it acknowledges it needs. 

 

The more than nine-page document, found by The Associated Press in a building occupied by the Islamic extremists for almost a year, is signed by Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, the nom de guerre of Abdelmalek Droukdel, the senior commander appointed by Osama bin Laden to run al-Qaida's branch in Africa. The clear-headed, point-by-point assessment resembles a memo from a CEO to his top managers and lays out for his jihadists in Mali what they have done wrong in months past, and what they need to do to correct their behavior in the future. 

 

Droukdel, the emir of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, perhaps surprisingly argues that his fighters moved too fast and too brutally in applying the Islamic law known as Shariah to northern Mali. Comparing the relationship of al-Qaida to Mali as that of an adult to an infant, he urges them to be more gentle, like a parent: 

 

"The current baby is in its first days, crawling on its knees, and has not yet stood on its two legs," he writes. "If we really want it to stand on its own two feet in this world full of enemies waiting to pounce, we must ease its burden, take it by the hand, help it and support it until its stands." 

 

He scolds his fighters for being too forceful and warns that if they don't ease off, their entire project could be thrown into jeopardy: "Every mistake in this important stage of the life of the baby will be a heavy burden on his shoulders. The larger the mistake, the heavier the burden on his back, and we could end up suffocating him suddenly and causing his death." 

 

The letter is divided into six chapters, three of which the AP recovered, along with loose pages, on the floor of the Ministry of Finance's Regional Audit Department. Residents say the building, one of several the Islamic extremists took over in this ancient city of sundried, mud-brick homes, was particularly well-guarded with two checkpoints, and a zigzag of barriers at the entrance. 

 

Droukdel's letter is one of only a few internal documents between commanders of al-Qaida's African wing that have been found, and possibly the first to be made public, according to University of Toulouse Islamic scholar Mathieu Guidere. It is numbered 33/234, a system reserved for al-Qaida's internal communications, said Guidere, who helps oversee a database of documents generated by extremists, including Droukdel. 

 

"This is a document between the Islamists that has never been put before the public eye," said Guidere, who authenticated the letter after being sent a two-page sample. "It confirms something very important, which is the divisions about the strategic conception of the organization. There was a debate on how to establish an Islamic state in North Mali and how to apply Shariah." 

 

While the pages recovered are not dated, a reference to a conflict in June establishes that the message was sent at most eight months ago. 

 

The tone and timing of the letter suggest that al-Qaida is learning from its mistakes in places like Somalia and Algeria, where attempts to unilaterally impose its version of Islam backfired. They also reflect the influence of the Arab Spring, which showed the power of people to break regimes, and turned on its head al-Qaida's long-held view that only violence could bring about wholesale change, Guidere said. 

 

The letter suggests a change in the thinking, if not the rhetoric, of Droukdel, who is asking his men to behave with a restraint that he himself is not known for. Droukdel is believed to have overseen numerous suicide bombings, including one in 2007 where al-Qaida fighters bombed the United Nations building and a new government building in Algiers, killing 41 people. The same year, the U.S. designated him a global terrorist and banned Americans from doing business with him. 

 

In a video disseminated on jihadist forums a few months ago, Droukdel dared the French to intervene in Mali and said his men will turn the region into a "graveyard" for foreign fighters, according to a transcript provided by Washington-based SITE Intelligence. 

 

The fanaticism he exhibits in his public statements is in stark contrast to the advice he gives his men on the ground. In his private letter, he acknowledges that al-Qaida is vulnerable to a foreign intervention, and that international and regional pressure "exceeds our military and financial and structural capability for the time being." 

 

"It is very probable, perhaps certain, that a military intervention will occur ... which in the end will either force us to retreat to our rear bases or will provoke the people against us," writes Droukdel. "Taking into account this important factor, we must not go too far or take risks in our decisions or imagine that this project is a stable Islamic state." 

 

According to his own online biography, Droukdel was born 44 years ago into a religious family in the Algerian locality of Zayan. He says he enrolled into the technology department of a local university before turning to jihad, and his first job was making explosives for Algerian mujahedeen. In 2006, the group to which he belonged, known as the GSPC, became an arm of al-Qaida, after negotiations with Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's lieutenant. 

 

As Droukdel rose through the ranks, he came into direct contact with bin Laden, Guidere said. 

 

In the document found in Timbuktu, he cites a letter he received from bin Laden about the al-Hudaybiyah deal, a treaty signed circa 628 by the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraish tribe of Mecca, an agreement with non-Muslims that paved the way for Muslims to return to Mecca. 

 

"The smart Muslim leader would do these kinds of concessions in order to achieve the word of God eventually and to support the religion," he says. 

 

Perhaps the biggest concession Droukdel urges is for his fighters to slow down in implementing Shariah. 

 

When the Islamic extremists took over northern Mali 10 months ago, they restored order in a time of chaos, much as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and even created a hotline number for people to report crimes. But whatever goodwill they had built up evaporated when they started to destroy the city's historic monuments, whip women for not covering up and amputate the limbs of suspected thieves. 

 

"One of the wrong policies that we think you carried out is the extreme speed with which you applied Shariah, not taking into consideration the gradual evolution that should be applied in an environment that is ignorant of religion," Droukdel writes. "Our previous experience proved that applying Shariah this way, without taking the environment into consideration, will lead to people rejecting the religion, and engender hatred toward the mujahedeen, and will consequently lead to the failure of our experiment." 

 

Droukdel goes on to cite two specific applications of Shariah that he found problematic. He criticizes the destruction of Timbuktu's World Heritage-listed shrines, because, as he says, "on the internal front we are not strong." He also tells the fighters he disapproves of their religious punishment for adulterers — stoning to death — and their lashing of people, "and the fact that you prevented women from going out, and prevented children from playing, and searched the houses of the population." 

 

"Your officials need to control themselves," he writes. 

 

Droukdel's words reflect the division within one of al-Qaida's most ruthless affiliates, and may explain why Timbuktu, under the thumb of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, experienced a slightly less brutal version of Shariah than Gao, one of the three other major cities controlled by the extremists. There was only one amputation in Timbuktu over their 10-month rule, compared to a dozen or more in Gao, a city governed by an al-Qaida offshoot, MUJAO, which does not report to Droukdel. 

 

Droukdel's warning of rejection from locals also turned out to be prescient, as Shariah ran its course in Timbuktu. The breaking point, residents say, was the day last June when the jihadists descended on the cemetery with pickaxes and shovels and smashed the tombs of their saints, decrying what they called the sin of idolatry. 

 

Many in Timbuktu say that was the point of no return. "When they smashed our mausoleums, it hurt us deeply," said Alpha Sanechirfi, the director of the Malian Office of Tourism in Timbuktu. "For us, it was game over." 

 

Droukdel's letter also urges his followers to make concessions to win over other groups in the area, and in one case criticizes their failure to do so. For several months, the Islamic extremists controlling northern Mali coexisted with the secular National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad, or NMLA, the name given to Mali by Tuareg rebels who want their own state. The black flag of the extremists fluttered alongside the multi-colored one of the secular rebels, each occupying different areas of the towns. 

 

In late May, the two sides attempted to sign a deal, agreeing to create an independent Islamic state called Azawad. The agreement between the bon vivant Tuareg rebels and the Taliban-inspired extremists seemed doomed from the start. It fell apart days later. By June, the Islamic extremists had chased the secular rebels out of northern Mali's main cities. 

 

"The decision to go to war against the Azawad Liberation Movement, after becoming close and almost completing a deal with them, which we thought would be positive, is a major mistake in our assessment," Droukdel admonishes. "This fighting will have a negative impact on our project. So we ask you to solve the issue and correct it by working toward a peace deal." 

 

In an aside in brackets, Droukdel betrays the frustration of a manager who has not been informed of important decisions taken by his employees: "(We have not until now received any clarification from you, despite how perilous the operation was!!)" 

 

Droukdel also discusses the nuts and bolts of how territory and control might be shared by al-Qaida and the local radical Islamic group known as Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith. For much of last year, Ansar Dine claimed to be the rulers of both Timbuktu and Kidal, although by the end, there was mounting evidence that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb was calling the shots. 

 

The reason for this is now clear in his letter: Droukdel asks his men to lower their profile, and allow local groups to take center stage. 

 

"We should also take into consideration not to monopolize the political and military stage. We should not be at the forefront," he says. "Better for you to be silent and pretend to be a 'domestic' movement that has its own causes and concerns. There is no reason for you to show that we have an expansionary, jihadi, al-Qaida or any other sort of project." 

 

The emir acknowledges that his fighters live on the fringes of society, and urges them to make alliances, including fixing their broken relationship with the NMLA. He vows that if they do what he says, they will have succeeded, even if an eventual military intervention forces them out of Mali. 

 

"The aim of building these bridges is to make it so that our mujahedeen are no longer isolated in society," he writes. "If we can achieve this positive thing in even a limited amount, then even if the project fails later, it will be just enough that we will have planted the first, good seed in this fertile soil and put pesticides and fertilizer on it, so that the tree will grow more quickly. We look forward to seeing this tree as it will be eventually: Stable and magnificent." 

 

DIABALY, Mali (AP) — Abou Zeid, the shadowy and feared emir of one of al-Qaida's most successful cells, commandeered the packed-dirt home of a family here last week, embedding himself and his hundreds of men in this community of rice growers. He ate spaghetti and powdered milk, read the Quran and planned a war.

 

His bearded and turbaned men parked cars under the mango trees of the farmers, slept in their bedrooms and turned their courtyards into command centers and their warehouses into armories. And it took eight days before French air strikes finally drove them out of Diabaly, a pinprick of a town, in the first major showdown of the struggle to reclaim Mali's al-Qaida-occupied north.

 

The tactics used by the Islamist fighters in Diabaly offer a peephole into the kind of insurgency they plan to lead, and suggest the challenges the international community will face in the effort to dislodge them. They show how the Islamists are holding their ground despite a superior French force with sophisticated fighter jets, a fleet of combat helicopters and hundreds of soldiers.

 

"The only thing that prevented the French planes from annihilating these people is that they were hiding in our homes. The French did everything to avoid civilian casualties," said Gaoussou Kone, a resident of the Berlin neighborhood of Diabaly, where Abou Zeid set up his command center. "That's why it took so long to liberate Diabaly."

 

Testimony from families, statements by French and local officials and the trash left behind by the fighters — including a handwritten inventory of weapons — provide a sketch of how the Islamists operated. The portrait that emerges is of a determined and nimble band of fighters, who have adapted to the terrain around them and instinctively understand that France, which unilaterally launched the intervention 12 days ago in their former West African colony, cannot afford to kill civilians.

 

The strategy of melting into the communities that house them and winning them over is one al-Qaida has already used successfully elsewhere, including in Afghanistan. It's now being perfected in Mali by a new generation of jihadists, with help from the terror network's veterans.

 

"They have seasoned al-Qaida fighters that have fought overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and that are essentially providing coaching and training," said Rudolph Atallah, former director of counterterrorism for Africa at the Pentagon, who has led several defense missions to Mali.

 

Diabaly, population 35,000, has only one of everything — one pharmacy, one road, one secondary school.

 

Kone and his neighbors were woken up at 3 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 14, by the sound of gunfire. By breakfast time, the column of fighters entered the town, and the government soldiers stationed here were seen fleeing on foot. The combatants wore bulletproof vests over an unfamiliar style of tunic that stopped at their knees, meant to evoke that worn by the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century.

 

They handed out candy to the children and took down the Malian flag flapping above the school. Then they scouted out houses.

 

"It was Monday at around 7:30 a.m. that they came into my house. They gave out bonbons and gifts to the children, and told us not to be afraid," said Hamidou Sissouma, a schoolteacher, pulling out a short, gray-colored string of prayer beads they had given him. "Then they made themselves tea. They used my bucket to wash themselves. ... I was afraid, so I left and went to stay with friends."

 

Within hours, French jets arrived and bombed five rebel vehicles parked in the open, leaving only their charred shells. By Tuesday, the Islamists were looking for cover for their fleet of about 30 to 40 all-terrain vehicles.

 

When Sissouma returned to his house, he found they had rammed a pickup truck into the wall of his compound, punching a hole large enough to drive two 4-by-4's into his courtyard. They promised to reimburse him for the damage.

 

The men at Sissouma's house reported to a light-skinned Arabic-speaking man, whose unit also took over the home of a neighbor, Mohamed Sanogo. Both houses seem to have been chosen for their bountiful mango trees. The men parked their cars so close to a tree in Sanogo's yard that they shaved off a lower branch, Sanogo said, showing the scarred, freshly-cut stump. They collected dirt, added water and painted their vehicles with mud, further camouflaging them.

 

When Kone came over to Sanogo's house on Wednesday, he stumbled upon the uninvited houseguests. He immediately turned to leave. The short, light-skinned man who appeared to be their leader waved him in, telling him not to be afraid. "Do you know who I am?" the man asked. His white beard pointed out from his chin in a scruffy goatee, and he spoke only a smattering of French, using Arabic with his guards.

 

When Kone said no, the commander told him to go watch the evening news. Then, changing his mind, he declared: "I am Abou Zeid."

 

Roughly a dozen other residents confirmed that the man occupying the house had identified himself as Abou Zeid. Their description matches the few photographs that exist of a man described by the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations as "the most violent and radical" of the leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

 

Born in southern Algeria, the 50-something jihadist has operated in Mali since at least 2003, and is behind dozens of kidnappings of European aid workers and tourists, each of whom earned him an estimated $2 to $3 million, according to Stratfor, an intelligence gathering unit. Known for his deep-seated hatred of the West, he has executed several hostages and is the subject of United Nations sanctions due to his association with al-Qaida.

 

In Diabaly, he exuded authority, residents say, and fighters approached him with deference, speaking in a lowered voice, almost a whisper, as if addressing a priest. He spent the daylight hours sitting on a mat in the shade reading the Quran. At all times, he was flanked by at a minimum five guards, and at least one stood sentinel at night when he slept.

 

The rebels were traveling with boxes of food imported from Algeria, Abou Zeid's birthplace. He left behind several discarded macaroni packets made by a brand headquartered in Algeria, according to the label, along with packages of Algerian powdered milk on the floor of the room where he slept.

 

Although Diabaly residents were terrified by the fighters, and many came out to cheer the French, they said the Islamists had gone to lengths to show respect.

 

When fighters entered the compound next to Sidi Toure's, they addressed Toure over the shared wall between the two homes. His neighbors had fled.

 

"They explained that they wanted to take over my neighbor's house, and said they were willing to pay rent," he said. "Even for the water that they took from our well, they offered to pay."

 

Toure said he told them he did not need their money and would rather they leave. They said they would not stay long.

 

The room they used to stock their arms is now empty, except for a few cardboard boxes and a former ammunition crate. What they forgot to take was a notebook, where they started writing in the ledger from the back page to the front, as is customary in Arabic.

 

The first page of writing begins with an inventory of weapons: "One 60 mm mortar, One Toshka machine gun, Three machine guns, Four Dabekterbov machine guns without a magazine, One armored Bika, 16 Chinese Kalashnikov rifles without magazines, 21 Sardinia 23, 26 RPG shells ..." in a list that reads like the ingredients for a Soviet-era war.

 

As the French air strikes intensified, the fighters blended in more and more with the population, said witnesses. They no longer drove their cars, borrowing scooters from locals, and timed their movements to match those of civilians.

 

"When the population is outside, they are outside," said Kone. "When the population is indoors, they are indoors."

 

Where they managed to bomb, the French did so with remarkable precision. They took out five cars parked just yards from the home of Adama Nantoume without harming his family or damaging his home.

 

"The explosions were so loud that for a while I thought I had gone deaf," Nantoume said. "I was suffocated by the smoke. And the light burned my eyes. The gas made me cry. ... But I was not hurt."

 

As Diabaly began to empty out, the Islamists set up roadblocks to prevent civilians from leaving, according to locals whose families and friends were turned back. Many made it out anyway, cutting across unpatrolled rice fields.

 

Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the Islamists left on Thursday. It's not clear if they went because of the damage done by the sustained air raids, or in the face of a pending land assault. Residents said their departing cars looked like moving bushes because they had so much foliage attached to them.

 

It was another four days before the French declared the area safe to enter.

 

As of Monday, life in Diabaly appeared to have gone back to normal. Women gave their children bucket baths and washed their pots and pans in the irrigation canal running along one side of the town. The families whose properties had been occupied by the Islamists were cleaning up the trash they left behind.

 

One of the few things the Islamists stole, residents said, was a Canal+ cable television decoder. They wanted access to French channels to learn what the French were saying about the battle they had just fought.

 

___

 

TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — The photocopies of the manual lay in heaps on the floor, in stacks that scaled one wall, like Xeroxed, stapled handouts for a class.

 

Except that the students in this case were al-Qaida fighters in Mali. And the manual was a detailed guide, with diagrams and photographs, on how to use a weapon that particularly concerns the United States: A surface-to-air missile capable of taking down a commercial airplane.

 

The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaida cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms depots of ex-Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

 

"The existence of what apparently constitutes a 'Dummies Guide to MANPADS' is strong circumstantial evidence of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb having the missiles," said Atlantic Council analyst Peter Pham, a former adviser to the United States' military command in Africa and an instructor to U.S. Special Forces. "Why else bother to write the guide if you don't have the weapons? ... If AQIM not only has the MANPADS, but also fighters who know how to use them effectively," he added, "then the impact is significant, not only on the current conflict, but on security throughout North and West Africa, and possibly beyond."

 

This is not the first al-Qaida-linked group thought to have MANPADS - they were circulating in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a terror cell in Somalia recently claimed to have the SA-7 in a video. But the U.S. desperately wanted to keep the weapons out of the hands of al-Qaida's largest affiliate on the continent, based in Mali. In the spring of 2011, before the fighting in Tripoli had even stopped, a U.S. team flew to Libya to secure Gadhafi's stockpile of thousands of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles.

 

By the time they got there, many had already been looted.

 

"The MANPADS were specifically being sought out," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, who catalogued missing weapons at dozens of munitions depots and often found nothing in the boxes labeled with the code for surface-to-air missiles.

 

The manual is believed to be an excerpt from a terrorist encyclopedia edited by Osama bin Laden. It adds to evidence for the weapon found by French forces during their land assault in Mali earlier this year, including the discovery of the SA-7's battery pack and launch tube, according to military statements and an aviation official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to comment.

 

The knowledge that the terrorists have the weapon has already changed the way the French are carrying out their five-month-old offensive in Mali. They are using more fighter jets rather than helicopters to fly above its range of 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) from the ground, even though that makes it harder to attack the jihadists. They are also making cargo planes land and take off more steeply to limit how long they are exposed, in line with similar practices in Iraq after an SA-14 hit the wing of a DHL cargo plane in 2003.

 

And they have added their own surveillance at Mali's international airport in Bamako, according to two French aviation officials and an officer in the Operation Serval force. All three spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.

 

"There are patrols every day," said the French officer. "It's one of the things we have not entrusted to the Malians, because the stakes are too high."

 

First introduced in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, the SA-7 was designed to be portable. Not much larger than a poster tube, it can be packed into a duffel bag and easily carried. It's also affordable, with some SA-7s selling for as little as $5,000.

 

Since 1975, at least 40 civilian aircraft have been hit by different types of MANPADS, causing about 28 crashes and more than 800 deaths around the world, according to the U.S. Department of State.

 

The SA-7 is an old generation model, which means most military planes now come equipped with a built-in protection mechanism against it. But that's not the case for commercial planes, and the threat is greatest to civilian aviation.

 

In Kenya in 2002, suspected Islamic extremists fired two SA-7s at a Boeing 757 carrying 271 vacationers back to Israel, but missed. Insurgents in Iraq used the weapons, and YouTube videos abound purporting to show Syrian rebels using the SA-7 to shoot down regime planes.

 

An SA-7 tracks a plane by directing itself toward the source of the heat, the engine. It takes time and practice, however, to fire it within range. The failure of the jihadists in Mali so far to hit a plane could mean that they cannot position themselves near airports with commercial flights, or that they are not yet fully trained to use the missile.

 

"This is not a 'Fire and forget' weapon," said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. "There's a paradox here. One the one hand it's not easy to use, but against any commercial aircraft there would be no defenses against them. It's impossible to protect against it. ... If terrorists start training and learn how to use them, we'll be in a lot of trouble."

 

In Timbuktu, SA-7 training was likely part of the curriculum at the 'Jihad Academy' housed in a former police station, said Jean-Paul Rouiller, director of the Geneva Center for Training and Analysis of Terrorism, one of three experts who reviewed the manual for AP. It's located less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the Ministry of Finance's Budget Division building where the manual was found.

 

Neighbors say they saw foreign fighters running laps each day, carrying out target practice and inhaling and holding their breath with a pipe-like object on their shoulder. The drill is standard practice for shoulder-held missiles, including the SA-7.

 

As the jihadists fled ahead of the arrival of French troops who liberated Timbuktu on Jan. 28, they left the manual behind, along with other instructional material, including a spiral-bound pamphlet showing how to use the KPV-14.5 anti-aircraft machine gun and another on how to make a bomb out of ammonium nitrate, among other documents retrieved by the AP. Residents said the jihadists grabbed reams of paper from inside the building, doused them in fuel and set them alight. The black, feathery ash lay on top of the sand in a ditch just outside the building's gate.

 

However, numerous buildings were still full of scattered papers.

 

"They just couldn't destroy everything," said neighbor Mohamed Alassane. "They appeared to be in a panic when the French came. They left in a state of disorder."

 

The manual is illustrated with grainy images of Soviet-looking soldiers firing the weapon. Point-by-point instructions explain how to insert the battery, focus on the target and fire.

 

The manual also explains that the missile will malfunction above 45 degrees Celsius, the temperature in the deserts north of Timbuktu. And it advises the shooter to change immediately into a second set of clothes after firing to avoid detection.

 

Its pages are numbered 313 through 338, suggesting they came from elsewhere. Mathieu Guidere, an expert on Islamic extremists at the University of Toulouse, believes the excerpts are lifted from the Encyclopedia of Jihad, an 11-volume survey on the craft of war first compiled by the Taliban in the 1990s and later codified by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, who led a contingent of Arab fighters in Afghanistan at the time, paid to have the encyclopedia translated into Arabic, according to Guidere, author of a book on al-Qaida's North African branch.

 

However, the cover page of the manual boasts the name of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

 

"It's a way to make it their own," said Guidere. "It's like putting a logo on something. ... It shows the historic as well as the present link between al-Qaida core and AQIM."

 

Bin Laden later assembled a team of editors to update the manual, put it on CD-ROMs and eventually place it on the Internet, in a move that lay the groundwork for the globalization of jihad, according to terrorism expert Jarret Brachman, who was the director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center when the al-Qaida encyclopedia was first found.

 

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an arms expert in Australia, confirmed that the information in the manual in Timbuktu on the missile's engagement range, altitude and weight appeared largely correct. He cautions though that the history of the SA-7 is one of near-misses, specifically because it takes training to use.

 

"Even if you get your hands on an SA-7, it's no guarantee of success," he said. "However, if someone manages to take down a civilian aircraft, it's hundreds of dead instantly. It's a high impact, low-frequency event, and it sows a lot of fear."

 

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TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — One of the last things the bearded fighters did before leaving this city was to drive to the market where traders lay their carpets out in the sand. 

 

The al-Qaida extremists bypassed the brightly colored, high-end synthetic floor coverings and stopped their pickup truck in front of a man selling more modest mats woven from desert grass, priced at $1.40 apiece. There they bought two bales of 25 mats each, and asked him to bundle them on top of the car, along with a stack of sticks. 

 

"It's the first time someone has bought such a large amount," said the mat seller, Leitny Cisse al-Djoumat. "They didn't explain why they wanted so many." 

 

Military officials can tell why: The fighters are stretching the mats across the tops of their cars on poles to form natural carports, so that drones cannot detect them from the air. 

 

The instruction to camouflage cars is one of 22 tips on how to avoid drones, listed on a document left behind by the Islamic extremists as they fled northern Mali from a French military intervention last month. A Xeroxed copy of the document, which was first published on a jihadist forum two years ago, was found by The Associated Press in a manila envelope on the floor of a building here occupied by al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb. 

 

The tipsheet reflects how al-Qaida's chapter in North Africa anticipated a military intervention that would make use of drones, as the battleground in the war on terror worldwide is shifting from boots on the ground to unmanned planes in the air. The presence of the document in Mali, first authored by a Yemeni, also shows the coordination between al-Qaida chapters, which security experts have called a source of increasing concern. 

 

"This new document... shows we are no longer dealing with an isolated local problem, but with an enemy which is reaching across continents to share advice," said Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, now the director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution. 

 

The tips in the document range from the broad (No. 7, hide from being directly or indirectly spotted, especially at night) to the specific (No 18, formation of fake gatherings, for example by using dolls and statues placed outside false ditches to mislead the enemy.) The use of the mats appears to be a West African twist on No. 3, which advises camouflaging the tops of cars and the roofs of buildings, possibly by spreading reflective glass. 

 

While some of the tips are outdated or far-fetched, taken together, they suggest the Islamists in Mali are responding to the threat of drones with sound, common-sense advice that may help them to melt into the desert in between attacks, leaving barely a trace.

 

"These are not dumb techniques. It shows that they are acting pretty astutely," said Col. Cedric Leighton, a 26-year-veteran of the United States Air Force, who helped set up the Predator drone program, which later tracked Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. "What it does is, it buys them a little bit more time — and in this conflict, time is key. And they will use it to move away from an area, from a bombing raid, and do it very quickly." 

 

The success of some of the tips will depend on the circumstances and the model of drones used, Leighton said. For example, from the air, where perceptions of depth become obfuscated, an imagery sensor would interpret a mat stretched over the top of a car as one lying on the ground, concealing the vehicle. 

 

New models of drones, such as the Harfung used by the French or the MQ-9 "Reaper," sometimes have infrared sensors that can pick up the heat signature of a car whose engine has just been shut off. However, even an infrared sensor would have trouble detecting a car left under a mat tent overnight, so that its temperature is the same as on the surrounding ground, Leighton said. 

 

Unarmed drones are already being used by the French in Mali to collect intelligence on al-Qaida groups, and U.S. officials have said plans are underway to establish a new drone base in northwestern Africa. The U.S. recently signed a "status of forces agreement" with Niger, one of the nations bordering Mali, suggesting the drone base may be situated there and would be primarily used to gather intelligence to help the French. 

 

The author of the tipsheet found in Timbuktu is Abdallah bin Muhammad, the nom de guerre for a senior commander of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based branch of the terror network. The document was first published in Arabic on an extremist website on June 2, 2011, a month after bin Laden's death, according to Mathieu Guidere, a professor at the University of Toulouse. Guidere runs a database of statements by extremist groups, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, and he reviewed and authenticated the document found by the AP. 

 

The tipsheet is still little known, if at all, in English, though it has been republished at least three times in Arabic on other jihadist forums after drone strikes took out U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011 and al-Qaida second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi in Pakistan in June 2012. It was most recently issued two weeks ago on another extremist website after plans for the possible U.S. drone base in Niger began surfacing, Guidere said. 

 

"This document supports the fact that they knew there are secret U.S. bases for drones, and were preparing themselves," he said. "They were thinking about this issue for a long time." 

 

The idea of hiding under trees to avoid drones, which is tip No. 10, appears to be coming from the highest levels of the terror network. In a letter written by bin Laden and first published by the U.S. Center for Combating Terrorism, the terror mastermind instructs his followers to deliver a message to Abdelmalek Droukdel, the head of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, whose fighters have been active in Mali for at least a decade. 

 

"I want the brothers in the Islamic Maghreb to know that planting trees helps the mujahedeen and gives them cover," bin Laden writes in the missive. "Trees will give the mujahedeen the freedom to move around especially if the enemy sends spying aircrafts to the area." 

 

Hiding under trees is exactly what the al-Qaida fighters did in Mali, according to residents in Diabaly, the last town they took before the French stemmed their advance last month. Just after French warplanes incinerated rebel cars that had been left outside, the fighters began to commandeer houses with large mango trees and park their four-by-fours in the shade of their rubbery leaves. 

 

Hamidou Sissouma, a schoolteacher, said the Islamists chose his house because of its generous trees, and rammed their trucks through his earthen wall to drive right into his courtyard. Another resident showed the gash the occupiers had made in his mango tree by parking their pickup too close to the trunk. 

 

In Timbuktu also, fighters hid their cars under trees, and disembarked from them in a hurry when they were being chased, in accordance with tip No. 13. 

 

Moustapha al-Housseini, an appliance repairman, was outside his shop fixing a client's broken radio on the day the aerial bombardments began. He said he heard the sound of the planes and saw the Islamists at almost the same moment. Abou Zeid, the senior al-Qaida emir in the region, rushed to jam his car under a pair of tamarind trees outside the store. 

 

"He and his men got out of the car and dove under the awning," said al-Housseini. "As for what I did? Me and my employees? We also ran. As fast as we could." 

 

Along with the grass mats, the al-Qaida men in Mali made creative use of another natural resource to hide their cars: Mud. 

 

Asse Ag Imahalit, a gardener at a building in Timbuktu, said he was at first puzzled to see that the fighters sleeping inside the compound sent for large bags of sugar every day. Then, he said, he observed them mixing the sugar with dirt, adding water and using the sticky mixture to "paint" their cars. Residents said the cars of the al-Qaida fighters are permanently covered in mud. 

 

The drone tipsheet, discovered in the regional tax department occupied by Abou Zeid, shows how familiar al-Qaida has become with drone attacks, which have allowed the U.S. to take out senior leaders in the terrorist group without a messy ground battle. The preface and epilogue of the tipsheet make it clear that al-Qaida well realizes the advantages of drones: They are relatively cheap in terms of money and lives, alleviating "the pressure of American public opinion." 

 

Ironically, the first drone attack on an al-Qaida figure in 2002 took out the head of the branch in Yemen — the same branch that authored the document found in Mali, according to Riedel. Drones began to be used in Iraq in 2006 and in Pakistan in 2007, but it wasn't until 2009 that they became a hallmark of the war on terror, he said. 

 

"Since we do not want to put boots on the ground in places like Mali, they are certain to be the way of the future," he said. "They are already the future." 

 

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TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — A year before he was caught on an intercept discussing the terror plot that prompted this week's sweeping closure of U.S. embassies abroad, al-Qaida's top operative in Yemen laid out his blueprint for how to wage jihad in letters sent to a fellow terrorist.

 

In what reads like a lesson plan, Nasser al-Wahishi provides a step-by-step assessment of what worked and what didn't in Yemen. But in the never-before-seen correspondence, the man at the center of the latest terror threat barely mentions the extremist methods that have transformed his organization into al-Qaida's most dangerous branch.

 

Instead, he urges his counterpart in Africa whose fighters had recently seized northern Mali to make sure the people in the areas they control have electricity and running water. He also offers tips for making garbage collection more efficient.

 

"Try to win them over through the conveniences of life," he writes. "It will make them sympathize with us and make them feel that their fate is tied to ours."

 

The perhaps surprising hearts-and-minds approach advocated by the 30-something Wahishi, who spent years as Osama bin Laden's personal secretary, is a sign of a broader shift within al-Qaida. After its failure in Iraq, say experts who were shown the correspondence, the terror network realized that it is not enough to win territory: They must also learn to govern it if they hope to hold it.

 

"People in the West view al-Qaida as only a terrorist organization, and it certainly is that ... but the group itself is much broader, and it is doing much more," says Gregory Johnsen, a scholar at Princeton University whose book, "The Last Refuge," charts the rise of al-Qaida in Yemen. "The group sees itself as an organization that can be a government."

 

The correspondence from al-Wahishi to Algerian national Abdelmalek Droukdel is part of a cache of documents found earlier this year by the AP in buildings in Timbuktu, which until January were occupied by al-Qaida's North African branch. The letters are dated May 21 and Aug. 6, 2012, soon after al-Wahishi's army in Yemen was forced to retreat from the territory it had seized amid an uprising against long-time Yemeni ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh.

 

At the time, the terror network as a whole was trying to come to grips with its losses in Iraq, where people rose up against the brutal punishments meted out by al-Qaida's local affiliate, a revolt which allowed U.S. forces to regain the territory they had occupied. That failure which was front and center in how al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula went about governing the two provinces it held for 16 months on Yemen's southern coast, including the region where al-Wahishi was born, says Robin Simcox, research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, author of a study chronicling the group's attempt at governance.

 

In the May letter, al-Wahishi warns his counterpart not to crack down too quickly or too harshly.

 

"You have to be kind," he writes. "You can't beat people for drinking alcohol when they don't even know the basics of how to pray. ... Try to avoid enforcing Islamic punishments as much as possible, unless you are forced to do so. ... We used this approach with the people and came away with good results."

 

Al-Qaida's foray into governance in Yemen began on the morning of Feb. 28, 2011, when residents of the locality of Jaar woke up to find an ominous black flag flying over their town. Fearing the worst, the population was mystified to discover that their extremist occupiers appeared more interested in public works projects, than in waging war.

 

"There were around 200 of them. They were wearing Afghan clothes, black robes that go to the knees, with a belt," said Nabil Al-Amoudi, a lawyer from Jaar. "They started extending water mains. ... They installed their own pipes. They succeeded in bringing electricity to areas that had not had power before."

 

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula chronicled their achievements in 22 issues of an online newsletter and in propaganda films showing glowing light bulbs and whirring fans inside the homes of villagers who had never had power before. In one video, al-Qaida fighters are seen leaning ladders against power poles and triumphantly yelling "Allah Akbar," or "God is great," each time they connect a downed wire. They took time to write a detailed report, a kind of al-Qaida 'case study' on their occupation, which al-Wahashi dutifully enclosed with his letter, like a college professor giving a handout to a student.

 

They were pushed out in June of 2012, just as al-Qaida's affiliate in North Africa succeeded in grabbing an Afghanistan-sized chunk of northern Mali, giving the terror network another chance to try their hand at governing. Adopting an avuncular, almost professorial tone, al-Wahishi, whose close relationship with Osama bin Laden allows him to speak with the authority of someone who studied at the knees of the master, advises Droukdel to publicize his good deeds. He advises them to do frequent PR, courting the media to change people's perception of the terror brand.

 

"The world is waiting to see what you do next and how you go about managing the affairs of your state," he writes. "Your enemies want to see you fail and they're throwing up obstacles to prove to people that the mujahedeen are people that are only good for fighting and war, and have nothing to do with running countries."

 

This preoccupation with al-Qaida's image is clear throughout the letters. The former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Stephen Seche, says the letters from al-Wahishi are in large part about the group's perception of itself.

 

"These guys are no longer in the business of just trying to take out Western targets. They are in the business of establishing themselves as legit alternatives to governments that are not present in areas on a daily business," says Seche, who served between 2007 and 2010. "I don't think we should be fooled by this. ...This is a velvet glove approach. It will come off."

 

For many in Yemen, the glove came off on Feb. 11, 2012, when a man accused of spying was arrested and sentenced to death by crucifixion. No amount of time or gradual application of Shariah could have prepared the population for what came next.

 

His body was left to rot, hanging from a power pole, a scene captured in a YouTube video, says Katherine Zimmerman, senior analyst at the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project, who identifies the incident as the turning point in public opinion.

 

Al-Wahishi does not acknowledge losing the support of the population, though he concedes his men were forced to retreat, as Yemen's army, backed by the U.S. military, regained control of the south. He explains that they pulled out after concluding that resisting would have both drained their resources, and caused high civilian casualties.

 

Al-Wahishi is blunt in laying out the cost of al-Qaida's foray — and how it was financed.

 

"The control of these areas during one year cost us 500 martyrs, 700 wounded, 10 cases of hand or leg amputation and nearly $20 million," he writes. "Most of the battle costs, if not all, were paid for through the spoils. Almost half the spoils came from hostages. Kidnapping hostages is an easy spoil, which I may describe as a profitable trade and a precious treasure."

 

In conclusion, al-Wahishi warns Droukdel not to be drawn into a prolonged war. He effectively recommends the strategy al-Qaida used in both Yemen and Mali: Melt into the background while preparing to strike again: "Hold on to your previous bases in the mountains, forests and deserts and prepare other refuges for the worst-case scenario," he says. "This is what we came to realize after our withdrawal."

 

A tiny man with a pointy beard, al-Wahishi spent years serving as Osama bin Laden's personal assistant, handling his day-to-day affairs before returning to his native Yemen, where he became emir of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in 2002. In 2009, the group attempted to send a suicide bomber with explosives sewn into his underwear onto a Detroit-bound flight. Recently, U.S. officials recently intercepted a communication between al-Wahishi and al-Qaida supreme chief Ayman al-Zawahri, causing the U.S. to shutter 19 embassies and consulates.

 

Although al-Qaida has been on a learning curve since Iraq, it still does not seem to understand how to govern populations used to a far more moderate form of Islam. Al-Qaida experts say this extremism is a permanent Achilles' heel for the terror franchise — their final destination jars, regardless of how slowly they drive to get there.

 

"The question is, are these groups always fated to overplay their hand?" asks Simcox. "They are so ideological, that they will always veer in this direction."

 

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The turbaned gunmen who infiltrated Nairobi's Westgate mall arrived with a set of religious trivia questions: As terrified civilians hid in toilet stalls, behind mannequins, in ventilation shafts and underneath food court tables, the assailants began a high-stakes game of 20 Questions to separate Muslims from those they consider infidels. 

 

A 14-year-old boy saved himself by jumping off the mall's roof, after learning from friends inside that they were quizzed on names of the Prophet Muhammad's relatives. A Jewish man scribbled a Quranic scripture on his hand to memorize, after hearing the terrorists were asking captives to recite specific verses. Numerous survivors described how the attackers from al-Shabab, a Somali cell which recently joined al-Qaida, shot people who failed to provide the correct answers. 

 

Their chilling accounts, combined with internal al-Shabab documents discovered earlier this year by The Associated Press, mark the final notch in a transformation within the global terror network, which began to rethink its approach after its setbacks in Iraq. Al-Qaida has since realized that the indiscriminate killing of Muslims is a strategic liability, and hopes instead to create a schism between Muslims and everyone else, whom they consider "kuffar," or apostates. 

 

"What this shows is al-Qaida's acknowledgment that the huge masses of Muslims they have killed is an enormous PR problem within the audience they are trying to reach," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization. "This is a problem they had documented and noticed going back to at least Iraq. And now we see al-Qaida groups are really taking efforts to address it." 

 

The evolution of al-Shabab is reflected in a set of three documents believed to be written by the terrorist group, and found by the AP in northern Mali earlier this year. They include the minutes of a conference of 85 Islamic scholars, held in December 2011 in Somalia, as well as a summary of fatwas they issued last year after acceptance into the al-Qaida fold. 

 

Baptized with the name al-Shabab, meaning The Youth, in 2006, the group began as an extremist militia, fighting the government of Somalia. As early as 2009, it began courting al-Qaida, issuing recordings with titles like, "At Your Service Osama." 

 

Until the Westgate attack, the group made no effort to spare Muslim civilians, hitting packed restaurants, bus stations and a government building where hundreds of students were awaiting test results. And until his death in 2011, Osama bin Laden refused to allow Shabab into the al-Qaida network, according to letters retrieved from his safehouse in Pakistan. The letters show that the terror leader was increasingly troubled by regional jihadi operations killing Muslim civilians. 

 

In a letter to Shabab in 2010, bin Laden politely advised the Somali-based fighters to review their operations "in order to minimize the toll to Muslims." Shabab did not get the green light to join al-Qaida until February 2012, almost a year after bin Laden's death. 

 

In an email exchange this week with The Associated Press, it made its intentions clear: "The Mujahideen carried out a meticulous vetting process at the mall and have taken every possible precaution to separate the Muslims from the Kuffar before carrying out their attack." However, even at Westgate, al-Shabab still killed Muslims, who were among the more than 60 civilians gunned down inside. 

 

Their attack was timed to coincide with the highest traffic at the upscale mall after 12:30 p.m. on Sept. 21, a Saturday. More than 1,000 people, including diplomats, pregnant women with strollers and foreign couples, were inside when the fighters armed with grenades and AK-47s burst in and opened fire. At first the attack had the indiscriminate character of all of Shabab's previous assaults. 

 

Rutvik Patel, 14, was in the aisles at Nakumatt, the mall's supermarket which sells everything from plasma TVs to imported kiwis, when he heard the first explosion. "They started shooting continuously, and whoever died, died," he said. "Then it became calm and they came up to people and began asking them some questions. If you knew the answer, they let you go," he said. "They asked the name of the Prophet's mom. They asked them to sing a religious verse." 

 

Just across from the Nakumatt supermarket, a 31-year-old Jewish businessman was cashing a check inside the local Barclays branch when he, too, heard the shooting. The people there ran to the back and shut themselves in the room with the safe, switching off the lights. They learned, via text messages, that the extremists were asking people to recite an Arabic prayer called the Shahada. 

 

"One of the women who was with us got a text from her husband saying, they're asking people to say the Islamic oath, and if you don't know it, they kill you," said the businessman, who insisted on anonymity out of fear for his safety. 

 

He threw away his passport. Then he downloaded the Arabic prayer and wrote it on his palm. 

 

Al-Shabab's attempts to identify Muslims are clear in the 16-page transcript from the conference of Islamic scholars held in the Somali town of Baidoa, an area known to be under Shabab control in 2011, according to Somalia specialist Kenneth Menkhaus, a political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina. The scholars issued several fatwas defining exactly who was a Muslim and who was an apostate. 

 

The document states it is halal, or lawful, to kill and rob those who commit crimes against Islam: "The French and the English are to be treated equally: Their blood and their money are halal wherever they may be. No Muslim in any part of the world may cooperate with them in any way. ... It leads to apostasy and expulsion from Islam," it says. Further on it adds: "Accordingly, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Ugandans and Burundians are just like the English and the French because they have invaded the Islamic country of Somalia." 

 

Former FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who investigated the bombing of the United States embassies in East Africa as well as the attack on the USS Cole, said that the gathering of dozens of religious scholars in an area under Shabab control harkens back to an al-Qaida conference in Afghanistan around 1997. That conference defined America as a target, Soufan said, leading to the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. 

 

"You see something very similar here," said Soufan. "It's the same playbook." 

 

In a second document dated Feb. 29, 2012 — just two weeks after al-Shabab joins al-Qaida — the organization warns Muslims to stay away from buildings occupied by non-Muslims, chillingly predicting and justifying the death of Muslims at Westgate. 

 

"And so all Muslims must stay far away from the enemy and their installations so as not to become human shields for them, and so as not to be hurt by the blows of the mujahedeen directed at the Crusader enemies," it says. "There is no excuse for those who live or mingle with the enemies in their locations." 

 

Yet at the same time it says: "The mujahideen are sincere in wanting to spare the blood of their brother Muslims, and they don't want a Muslim to die from the bullets directed at the enemies of God." 

 

This is a concession for an organization that since its inception had killed people constantly, said Rudolph Atallah, who tracked Shabab as Africa counterterrorism director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2003 to 2007. 

 

"They would just go and mow people down," Atallah said. "They are now sending a clear message that, 'Look, we're different ... We're no longer indiscriminately killing. We're protecting innocent Muslims and we are trying to kill quote-unquote 'infidels,' nonbelievers." 

 

A similar tactic paid off in January after al-Qaida-linked terrorist Moktar Belmoktar attacked a gas installation in Algeria, Atallah said. When his fighters freed hundreds of Muslim employees, a Facebook page dedicated to him exploded with "Likes." 

 

Several hours after the gunshots at Westgate Mall, the people cowering inside the Barclays bank heard a commotion. As the attackers approached, the Jewish businessman spit on his hand to erase the words he had by then committed to memory. 

 

The door opened. 

 

He exhaled. It was the police. 

 

Several floors above, 14-year-old Patel looked for a place to hide on the roof. When the jihadists came up the stairs and threw a grenade, he didn't hesitate. He jumped, crushing his ankle on the pavement below. 

 

He said he would not have known how to answer their questions. 

 

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TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — Across the desert, the wind combs the sand into smooth ripples that roll out evenly for miles. So when a hole is dug, you see it immediately. The sand looks agitated. Its pattern is disturbed. 

 

That's how you know where the bodies are buried. 

 

Close to three dozen people in northern Mali disappeared earlier this year, killed or taken away by the country's military, according to human rights groups. The victims were caught in a backlash against Arabs and Tuaregs, desert people who form a small and shrinking ethnic minority in Mali. As the West Africa bureau chief for The Associated Press, I wanted to know what had happened to them. 

 

Over six months, my colleagues and I tracked down what we would rather not have found: Six bodies in the desert, including that of a 70-year-old grandfather who had become a symbol of the killings. In each case, the victims had last been seen taken away by the Malian military at gunpoint. And in at least four of the cases, the military was found responsible in an internal report described to me but never released to the public. 

 

The bodies offer concrete evidence for killings that Mali's government has so far denied in public. If the government acknowledges their deaths, it could open a path to bring those who killed the men to justice. It also finally could return the bodies to their bereft families, who did not know where their loved ones were buried, or were too terrified to recover them. 

 

Mali's government, which has been promised $4.2 billion in aid from the international community, has refused to comment. The military reacted angrily. 

 

"You have no proof. Show me the proof!" Col. Diarran Kone, spokesman for Mali's ministry of defense, told the AP last week. After hearing that the AP investigation had located six of the bodies, he added: "We have nothing more to say about this." 

 

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We found the first body almost by accident, after our car got stuck in the sand. 

 

I was in Timbuktu to report on the end of an al-Qaida-led occupation, which among other things had rubbed salt into racial wounds. 

 

During their 10-month-long rule, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb had driven out the Malian army and terrorized this city. Its Arabic-speaking fighters created racial division by giving key posts to the city's Arabs and Tuaregs, who shared their history of marginalization, as well as their light skin tone. These traditionally nomadic people make up less than 10 percent of Mali's population of 15.9 million, the majority of whom are black. 

 

When France finally sent troops into its former colony to drive out the extremists in January, the city was in ecstasy. Women tore off their veils. People who had not heard music for close to a year danced in the streets, holding up cellphones as improvised boom boxes. 

 

But the bitterness of the invasion lingered. And when the army came back, it was looking to settle scores. In some cases, those who happened to share the same skin color as the extremists paid with their lives. 

 

A week after my arrival at the end of January, we began hearing rumors of bodies dumped in the desert. My colleague Baba Ahmed, AP's correspondent in Mali, drove north to the dunes, where his car got mired in the sand. 

 

The children who came to help push it out pointed him to the spot where a middle-aged man's white robe stuck out of the ground. He'd been dumped less than a mile outside the city, a few hundred yards from a soccer field. 

 

By the time I got there, the people living nearby seemed to know everything about the man lying beneath just one foot of sand, starting with his ethnicity: "L'Arabe," they said. Arab. 

 

The man, Mohamed Lamine, turned out to be the headmaster of a local Quranic school. We found his frightened wife, who confirmed that she had seen her husband loaded into the back of a military truck at gunpoint. 

 

She agreed to come to the grave in the dark, before dawn, with her parents. When she recognized her husband's robe, Ani Bokar Arby screamed out. Next to his head lay a spent bullet. 

 

Just a few yards away, we found the body of another Arab man, Mohamed Tidiane, a carpet seller taken the same day and identified by Lamine's family. 

 

These first two bodies taught us where and how to look: Drive north to a concrete cement flame built, ironically, as a memorial to peace. Then scan the undulating surface, until the sand gives itself away. 

 

Since January, Human Rights Watch has reported 24 killings of civilians by the Malian military, 11 disappearances, and more than 50 cases of abuse. Victims said they were beaten, electrocuted, waterboarded and injected with an acid-like substance. Amnesty International released similar findings last week, citing 24 killings and 11 disappearances, although it's unclear if they were the same ones. 

 

Tens of thousands of Arabs and Tuaregs fled to neighboring countries, leaving behind a maze of boarded-up houses and the concrete shells of looted businesses. Only a handful stayed in Timbuktu. 

 

It was around this time that I heard about Ali Ould Kabbad, the Arab grandfather also known to his family and friends simply as "Vieux Ali" or "Old Ali." 

 

Despite owning several hundred head of cattle, Vieux Ali lived simply, wearing the same plastic sandals so often that the band over his left toe had given out. 

 

His children begged him to leave, I later learned from them. But he wouldn't hear of it. He shook his Malian identity card in their faces. 

 

After all, he had already lived through three military crackdowns on Arabs and Tuaregs, who are locked into an unhappy marriage with the country's black majority because of land borders dating back to French colonial rule. Every time Tuareg separatists rebelled, the military responded with blunt force, killing both rebels and light-skinned civilians who looked like them. 

 

Vieux Ali, a descendant of one of Timbuktu's oldest Arab families, proudly pointed out that the graves of his ancestors lay just feet from the 400-year-old tomb of Sidi Mahmoud, the city's patron saint. It was proof, he said, that his ancestors had lived in Timbuktu since at least the 1500s. 

 

Why should he flee his own country, he asked, where he and his father and his grandfather were born? Hadn't his black neighbors said they would vouch for him? 

 

He took the precaution of presenting soldiers at the Malian military camp with a bull. He said it was a gift for liberating the city, though privately his family acknowledged it was an attempt to buy his safety. The soldiers chased him out. 

 

"That white man, get him out of here!" one of the soldiers is heard saying in footage captured by television station France 24. "We don't want any of their kind here." 

 

By the time the soldiers came for him, he had earned the nickname of "The Last Arab of Timbuktu." 

 

_____ 

 

On the morning of Feb. 14, the troops barricaded the street and surrounded his shop, according to witnesses. Vieux Ali was shaking so much, he couldn't get into the back of their pickup. They shoved him inside and made him lie under a tan-colored tarp. 

 

They were about to drive away when Maoloud Fassoukoy — one of Vieux Ali's black neighbors — pushed his way past the cordon. He ran to the truck, screaming "No! No! No! He's not the enemy!" 

 

The soldiers grabbed Fassoukoy too, and forced him to lie under the same tan tarp. 

 

The truck meandered through the sand-swept lanes of Timbuktu, and by the end of the day a total of nine men were missing. Except for Fassoukoy, all were Arab. 

 

The truck left the city, heading north. Toward the desert. 

 

_____ 

 

After he disappeared, Vieux Ali became a symbol of those who had gone missing. Supporters created a Facebook page. His lined face, grandfatherly air and insistence that he considered himself Malian moved people. 

 

His presumed killing was a "test case," according to Corinne Dufka, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch. 

 

"Mali is hanging in the balance. It could go either way," she said. "Depending on how this case is resolved, it can either reinforce the rule of law. Or reinforce impunity." 

 

However, the families of the nine missing men were too petrified to go to the dunes. And the army denied the killings to the public. 

 

"What bodies?" asked Kone from the Ministry of Defense. "The Malian army respects human rights. We are here to protect the population." 

 

Among the Arabs who had fled were the relatives of my colleague, Baba Ahmed, who is himself an Arab from Timbuktu. It wasn't long before concerned childhood friends began urging Baba to leave too. 

 

Baba insisted on staying, saying he was protected by his affiliation with an international news organization. But while we were at the pharmacy counter a few days after Vieux Ali's arrest, a military truck sped up. A soldier burst in and glared at Baba. Then he paused, realizing we were together. 

 

We left the soldier at the counter. As we went out, I noticed a tan tarp covering the bed of the military truck, just like the one that had covered up Vieux Ali. 

 

I couldn't escape the conclusion that they had come to take Baba away. 

 

_____ 

 

Baba left, and I stayed in Timbuktu for another two weeks. Each successive translator I hired refused to go to the dunes. 

 

Soldiers began making unannounced visits to my hotel, asking to speak to me. 

 

Late one night, a Malian hotel employee approached me, smelling of alcohol. "I know what you are doing," he said. "Everyone knows you're here to sully the reputation of our troops." 

 

That afternoon, I asked the driver I had hired to sleep outside my room for protection. 

 

I decided it was no longer safe to stay. Just before my departure, a source inside the Malian military asked to see me alone. He drew me a map. 

 

Drive north, he said, past the cement flame, then veer left. All the other times I had veered right. 

 

"Just wander around those dunes and you'll see them," he said. "The bodies are there." 

 

The next day, as I walked from dune to dune, I found an area where the dirt had coagulated. It was harder and darker, as if someone had poured water over the sand. 

 

The driver grabbed a shovel. We dug a few feet until we could smell the body and then stopped. The sand looked wet. Flies gathered. 

 

Later that day, I brought Ali's son, Ibrahim Ould Ali, and three relatives of the other victims to the spot. They took turns digging. Within minutes, the fingers of the dead man emerged. The victim had been buried face down, hands tied behind his back, his eyes bound with his turban. 

 

I saw the dread leave Ibrahim's face. It was not his father. 

 

A second man shared the same grave. Both were Tuaregs, by their features and hair. We would later learn the military had grabbed them from a village outside Timbuktu in January. 

 

I left Mali. 

 

Every few days at first, and then every few weeks, I received a call from Ibrahim, Vieux Ali's son. In broken French, he would ask me if I had news of his father. 

 

The last time he called, it was to say he too had fled Timbuktu. He said: "The soldiers told me they would do the same thing to me as they had to my father." 

 

_____ 

 

In July, when I returned to Timbuktu to cover the country's presidential election, my source inside the Malian military agreed to meet me at my hotel. 

 

He arrived with a soldier who had helped investigate the killings of the nine men for an internal military report, written under heavy pressure from human rights groups and the French. Based on the report, he said, the Ministry of Defense had detained five soldiers for questioning, but quietly let them go a few weeks later. 

 

The families never got the bodies. Nor did the military ever confirm what we presumed by now: All nine were dead. 

 

Nobody would let me use their names, because they were still too terrified of military reprisals. But finally, I pieced together what had happened to Ali. 

 

On the day of Ali's death in February, a shepherd had just sold a load of charcoal at the Timbuktu market, according to the investigator. As the shepherd walked back across the desert with his donkey to his camp, he saw a military truck parked on the other side of a dune. 

 

He ducked. Then he hurried back to town, where everyone was talking about the men who had just disappeared. 

 

He returned the next day. On the other side of the dune, he saw three humps. The normally feathery surface of the sand was stiff with water. 

 

That's where a unit of Malian troops had slit the men's throats with a knife, buried the bodies and washed their hands with a bottle of mineral water, the shepherd told investigators. He led them to the spot, where they unearthed the nine bodies to confirm the killings, then reburied them. 

 

The investigator brought the shepherd to me, while I waited in my car near the dunes. The shepherd wore a tightly-wound black turban that exposed only his eyes, never taking it off. He took me to the burial site without a word. 

 

For the last time, we drove north past the cement monument to a peace that has long eluded Mali. 

 

This time we went down a path I had not travelled before. Near a clump of desert grasses, the shepherd signaled to stop. 

 

He walked over to the base of a dune, bent down and traced an X in the sand with his finger. He made two more X's a few paces away. Then he walked off. 

 

I yelled after him — which one is Vieux Ali's grave? How many feet down? Petrified, he kept walking. 

 

I left a trail of paper torn from my notebook in order to remember my way back to the X's in the sand. Then I went to Ali's house -- but the entire family had fled. 

 

The only victim's relative I could find was Sidi Fassoukoy, the younger brother of Maoloud Fassoukoy, the neighbor who had tried to stop the soldiers from taking Ali and had been arrested too. 

 

At the dune, Sidi began peeling away the layers of sand with a shovel. Something white poked out of the dirt. 

 

It was the sole of a shoe. 

 

Sidi took the white Reebok off the foot of the dead man. 

 

"This is my shoe," he said, holding it up. "I bought this shoe and gave it to my brother as a present." 

 

Nearly half a year after the murder, the flesh was gone. All that was left were bones, inside clothes. 

 

Sidi uncovered an orange-and-white batik fabric covering the man's chest. He grabbed his own trousers to show the same print. The same tailor had made both sets of clothes. 

 

He pulled the dead man up by the top of his batik shirt. What was left of the body fell away with the sand. 

 

"This is Maoloud Fassoukoy," he said. "This is my brother." 

 

It was getting dark, and I was starting to panic. What if the soldiers found us? I realized we would only have time to dig under the first of the three spots marked by the shepherd. 

 

We were about to leave when we found another body. The dead man was wearing rubber sandals, and Sidi recognized them too. 

 

"These are the shoes of the old man," he said. "This is Vieux Ali." 

 

_____ 

 

Vieux Ali left behind 16 children. 

 

His eldest son, Mohamed Ould Ali, lives in Bamako, Mali's capital. He hired a lawyer to try to urge the courts to investigate his father's disappearance, but in vain. 

 

His eyes well with tears as he looks at the digital photographs of his father's shallow grave. He instantly recognizes his father's sandals — plastic, wide-soled, the closest thing the old man could find to orthopedic shoes. 

 

Mohamed calls his younger brother, Ibrahim, now in exile in Mauritania, who was with Vieux Ali on the day of his disappearance. Ibrahim recalls how his father had worn out the plastic band on the left toe of his sandals. 

 

Mohamed enlarges the photograph. He points to a slight tear in the plastic just above the left toe. 

 

"It's removed the doubt," Mohamed says. "It's like I can finally see the truth. I was chasing after a mirage. Because of my love for him, I kept hoping that he would be found alive." He adds: "Now can they continue to deny it?" 

 

In his wallet, the son keeps a yellowing post-it note. It lists the names of the nine men grabbed that day: Maoloud Fassoukoy, Ali Ould Kabbad, Mohamed Lamine, Dana Dahama, Hama Ould Dahama, Mohamed Ould Mahmoud, Tidiane Ould Mahmoud, Sidi Mohamed Ould Ahmed, Youba Ould Ahmed. 

 

_____ 

 

There are still bodies missing. 

 

And there are still two places back in the desert that a shepherd marked with an X to show where they may lie. 

 

Even though the wind long ago erased the marks in the sand. 

 

___