"A Divine Order"

"The destruction is a divine order.  It's our Prophet who said that each time that someone builds something on top of a grave, it needs to be pulled back to the ground.  We need to do this so that future generations don't get confused, and start venerating the saints as if they are God.  The only tribunal we recognize is the divine court of Sharia."  Oumar Ould Hamaha, Ansar Dine

"Timbuktu was a centre of Islamic learning, a very significant centre - there is lots of internal and external evidence of this.  But Unsar Dine is ignorant of this.  For them, there is only one book and it's the Koran.  All this other [Islamic] learning is inconsequential to them."  (The Wahhabi interpretation of Islam that Ansar Dine - like the Taliban - espouses is a narrow version of Islam, standing in contrast to the history of Islamic learning.)  Shamil Jeppie, Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, University of Cape Town, South Africa

The city has no fewer than 20,000 catalogued manuscripts, dating back as far as the 12th Century.  The manuscripts represent intellectual, religious, heritage treasures whose value far surpasses the tombs that the Islamists are destroying.  Many of them have been taken out of the city or buried within secure locations to ensure they too are not destroyed.

"We're talking about generations and generations of culture being destroyed.  It's an outrage for the entire world", explained the chairman of the Malian Manuscript Foundation based in New York.

Tombs of the saints have been destroyed.  A door of the Sidi Yahya mosque built in 1400 has been broken into.  The gate leading to the cemetery would open only at the end of time.  Now is the end of time for the worshippers of Islam who do it in their own customary manner in honour of their ancestors.  Ansar Dine members came to the mosque with shovels and pickaxes, to pull the door ajar.

They were ordained to do so by divine order.  To put an end to local legend.  To teach the faithful to place their faith in the Koran and there only.  "Since my childhood, I have never seen the door on the western side of the mosque open.  And I was born in 1947.  When we were children, we were told that the door would only open at the end of time."

"These religious people want to go to the source, to show us that this is not true...  Of course our population is not happy.  The women, especially, are crying a lot."

Centuries-old mausoleums have been destroyed.  All that the people hold dear is being pillaged.  This, by "Protectors of the Faith".  The Ansar Dine in taking control of Timbuktu, throwing out the Tuareg rebel faction.  Rebels making common cause with Islamists.  The rebels outmanoeuvred by the Islamists, their weapons taken, they themselves neutered.

The Islamist fighters have declared war on the remains of Sufi saints, destroying world-famous tombs, screaming "Allah Akbar".  Condemnation by the United Nations or the world court is irrelevant to these champions of Islamism and sharia; they recognize no authority but that vested in them by the Koran and sharia law.

And in Gao, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb plant mines on the city perimeter to dissuade the rebels from returning, holding the city's residents as hostages to their plan of complete Islamization.  Clashes between the Tuareg rebels and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa have made hostages of the people of Gao.

Idolatry is not permitted in Islam.  Acting in the name of God, the Islamists are on track to "destroy every mausoleum in the city.  All of them, without exception."