Timbuktu turning into a 'ghost town'
2013-01-25 11:09
Bamako - Radical Islamists have left fabled Timbuktu in
northern Mali, turning it into a "ghost town" with no electricity or
drinking water for three days, residents and officials said Thursday.
"There is no water. The people have left and the
Islamists too. It's a ghost town," said municipal official Moctar Ould
Kery.
A resident confirmed the information, saying: "For
three days there has been no power or potable water", amid a French-led
military campaign to oust the Islamist groups that seized control of northern
Mali in April 2012.
A regional security source said the Islamists were
"regrouping in the region of Kidal", in Mali's extreme northeast.
The Islamists kept the electricity and water running with
generators but their departure left a vacuum, especially as their fuel stocks
had been destroyed in French air raids.
French planes on Sunday night bombed a major base of al-Qaeda
in Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) near Timbuktu, destroying a mansion belonging to
Libya's former strongman Muammar Gaddafi which was being used by Islamist
radicals as their headquarters.
A fabled caravan town on the edge of the Sahara desert,
Timbuktu - which lies 900km from Mali's
capital Bamako - was for centuries a key centre of Islamic learning and has
become a byword for exotic remoteness in the Western imagination.
Today Timbuktu is a battlefield, overrun by Islamist
militants who have been razing its world-heritage religious sites in a
destructive rampage that the United Nations cultural agency deplored as
"tragic".
- SAPA
