ISISDestruction of Timbuktu sites by Islamists shocked humanity: ICC prosecutor
Fatou Bensouda, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, speaking at the opening of the war crimes trial against a Malian jihadist leader charged with demolishing ancient mausoleums in Timbuktu, said the world must “stand up to the destruction and defacing of our common heritage.” Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, 40, is the first jihadist to is the first person to face a war crimes charge for an attack on a historic and cultural monument.
ISIS followers destroy Sidi Yahya mosque // Source: csc.asu.edu
Fatou Bensouda, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, speaking at the opening of the war crimes trial against a Malian jihadist leader charged with demolishing ancient mausoleums in Timbuktu, said the world must “stand up to the destruction and defacing of our common heritage.” “Humanity’s collective consciousness was shocked by the destruction of these sites. Such an attack must not go unpunished,” Bensouda told the tribunal in The Hague.
The Sydney Morning-Herald reports that Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, 40, is the first jihadist to is the first person to face a war crimes charge for an attack on a historic and cultural monument.
In the first phase of the proceedings, prosecutors must persuade a panel of three judges that there is enough evidence to proceed to a trial.
Faqi, a member of an Islamic court set up by Malian jihadist group Ansar Dine to enforce strict sharia law, is accused of having ordered or carried out the destruction of nine mausoleums and Timbuktu’s famous Sidi Yahia mosque, dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Prosecutors charge that that fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Dine set upon the shrines with pickaxes, iron bars, and vehicles, in what prosecutors describe as a “callous assault on the dignity of an entire population and their cultural identity.”
Timbuktu, founded by Tuareg tribes in the eleventh century, was listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1988. It was a center of Islamic learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth, but jihadists consider it to be idolatrous.
Faqi was a senior leader of Ansar Dine, an Islamist group which, in March 2012, joined with Tuareg separatists to create an Islamic state in north Mali – a state they called Azawad. A French expeditionary force evicted the Islamists from Azawad in January 2013 and reunified Mali.
Faqi’s lawyer, Jean-Louis Gilissen, said his client “wanted to make a contribution to what he thought and understood to be the divine message [by] doing what is right and seeking the means of good over evil to prevail.”
He said Faqi “never meant to attack the contents of the mausoleums, but what was built on top of them.”
Faqi was arrested in Niger and transferred to the ICC in September 2015.
