International Criminal Court judges on Wednesday convicted a Malian jihadist of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the terror group’s nine-month occupation of the ancient city of Timbuktu.
The three-member panel said the man, Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, was a former police leader who was instrumental in organizing repressive structures. An important role was played within the Islamic Police, a structure designed to impose extreme forms of Sharia law over more tolerant forms.
The presiding judge, Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua, said Mr Al-Hassan was “convicted by a majority verdict of war crimes and crimes against humanity” for the public flogging. including torture, cruel treatment and violation of personal dignity”.
Mr Al-Hasan, 46, was also convicted of religious persecution and participating in a sham trial by an Islamic court.
Prosecutors insist he was an accomplice in crimes against women who were raped and turned into sex slaves because they had to marry jihadist fighters. But the judge said that while several women had testified that they had been raped by members of the jihadi police when they were arrested for inappropriate clothing or having sex outside marriage, and that other women had been forced into marriages, Mr Al-Hasan was not involved in such case or criminal liability.
Mr Al-Hasan was acquitted of involvement in the destruction of the tombs of Muslim saints, who are revered locally. Holy warriors call their worship heresy.
His sentence is expected to be handed down soon, the court said.
Hassan has pleaded not guilty to all charges but has not denied being a member of Ansar Dine.
Wednesday’s ruling comes nearly a week after a court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Ansar Dine founder and leader Iyad Ag Ghaly, also known as Abu Fadel. ‘s whereabouts are unknown.
Most Mali people were unaware of the trial, said El Hadj Djitteye, an analyst who was in Timbuktu during the occupation and later founded the Timbuktu Center for Strategic Studies in the Sahel.
By contrast, Mr Ag Ghali is one of Mali’s best-known jihadists and any trial against him would be closely watched, he said. That could significantly change the West African nation’s current perception of the ICC — that it has little to do with Mali’s current troubles.
The jihadist occupation of Timbuktu became notorious at the time because the desert city had long been a Muslim pilgrimage site and was known for its revered mosques and collection of ancient manuscripts. In early 2013, French and Malian forces regained control and drove out the jihadists.
Veteran Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako later described the suffering faced by local residents in the critically acclaimed 2014 film Timbuktu.
In an earlier case in 2016, a court sentenced another jihadist to nine years in prison after he showed remorse and admitted ordering and participating in attacks on holy sites in Timbuktu.
The damaged mausoleum has since been restored with the help of foreign donors.
But many of the abuses against women and men cited in Mr Hassan’s trial are similar to those still occurring in other parts of Mali and in neighboring countries.
Over the past decade, groups aligned with Al Qaeda and Islamic State have unleashed more violence in the country and other parts of West Africa, turning the region known as the Sahel, the vast swath of sub-Saharan Africa, into a center of terror activity.
In 2012, jihadist groups such as Ansar Dine controlled only parts of northern Mali. Now, militants linked to Al Qaeda and Islamic State have spread to more than half of the country’s center and south, as well as neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso.
Over the years, the groups have carried out waves of attacks on villages, ships and convoys, killing tens of thousands of civilians and displacing millions, according to data from research organizations and the United Nations that track the conflict.
“The jihadists are already entrenched there,” said Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, deputy director of the Sahel program at the International Crisis Group in Dakar, Senegal. This “makes their eradication more difficult,” he added.
The conflict currently plaguing Mali began in 2012 when a loose alliance of Tuareg rebel groups and Islamist militants took control of large swaths of the country’s north. , Gao and Kidal.
The French troops who uprooted Ansar Dine from Timbuktu left Mali in 2022 after a decade-long mission that many experts considered a failure. The United Nations peacekeeping mission also withdrew from Mali late last year as relations with Mali’s military rulers soured.
In addition to attacks in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, Ansar Dine’s al-Qaeda affiliate has carried out attacks in other West African countries, including Benin, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
Ruth MacLean Contributed reporting.
