Cultural terrorismIslamist militant pleads guilty to war crimes involving destruction of cultural, historical monuments

An Islamic extremist has pleaded guilty to destroying historic mausoleums in northern Mali city of Timbuktu. 

Ahmad Al Faqi al-Mahdi told the judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC), where his trial has began today (Monday), that he was entering the guilty plea “with deep regret and great pain.” 

The Daily Telegraph reports that he also advised Muslims around the world not to commit similar acts, saying “they are not going to lead to any good for humanity.”

Mahdi’s trial is the first ICC trial in which an individual was charged for war crimes for destroying historical and cultural monuments.

Mahdi was a commander in the Islamist group Ansar Dine which took over north Mali in April 2012, declaring it the independent Republic of Azawad. The Islamists were first joined by Tuareg separatists, who had been agitating for an independent Tuareg state sine the early 1960s. The moderate Tuaregs, however, were pushed aside, and the Islamists launched their campaign to impose Sharia law throughout the vast Azawad territory (which is the size of France). Once Ansar Dine rid themselves of the Tuaregs, and as part of their Islamization plan, they began a campaign of destruction against Tuareg and early Muslim shrines. Mahdi was in charge of the Islamist group’s destruction of fourteen of Timbuktu’s sixteen mausoleums, which the militants to be totems of idolatry. The one-room structures housing the tombs of the city’s great thinkers were on the World Heritage list. 

Ansar Dine was finally driven out of Mali in early 2013, after France sent an expeditionary force to Mali in January 2013. The French arrested Mahdi in 2014 in neighboring Niger. 

Mahdi’s trial is likely to last a week, with both the prosecutors and the defense planning presentations.

Mahdi faces a maximum sentence of thirty years imprisonment, but prosecutors have already said that they would seek a sentence of nine to eleven years. 

In his opening remarks, Mahdi told the three-judge panel he hopes his time in prison “will be a source of purging the evil spirits that had overtaken me.”