French-led troops ring Timbuktu, seize airport after lightning raid
29 Jan 2013 7:27 AM IST
French-led troops ringed Mali's fabled desert city of Timbuktu on Monday after seizing its airport in a lightning advance as fleeing Islamists torched a building housing priceless ancient manuscripts.
French paratroopers swooped in to try to block fleeing hardliners as ground troops coming from the south seized the airport in the ancient city which has been one of the bastions of the extremists controlling the north for 10 months.
‘We control the airport at Timbuktu,’ a senior officer with the Malian army said ‘We did not encounter any resistance.’ French army spokesman Colonel Thierry Burkhard said the troops, backed up by helicopters, had seized control of the so-called Niger Loop - the area alongside the curve of the Niger River flowing between Timbuktu and Gao - in less than 48 hours.
A fabled caravan town on the edge of the Sahara desert, Timbuktu was for centuries a key centre of Islamic learning and has become a byword for exotic remoteness in the Western imagination.
The once cosmopolitan town became a dusty outpost for the extremists who forced women to wear veils, whipped and stoned those who violated their version of strict Islamic law, and destroyed ancient Muslim shrines they considered ‘idolatrous’.
French paratroopers swooped in to try to block fleeing hardliners as ground troops coming from the south seized the airport in the ancient city which has been one of the bastions of the extremists controlling the north for 10 months.
‘We control the airport at Timbuktu,’ a senior officer with the Malian army said ‘We did not encounter any resistance.’ French army spokesman Colonel Thierry Burkhard said the troops, backed up by helicopters, had seized control of the so-called Niger Loop - the area alongside the curve of the Niger River flowing between Timbuktu and Gao - in less than 48 hours.
A fabled caravan town on the edge of the Sahara desert, Timbuktu was for centuries a key centre of Islamic learning and has become a byword for exotic remoteness in the Western imagination.
The once cosmopolitan town became a dusty outpost for the extremists who forced women to wear veils, whipped and stoned those who violated their version of strict Islamic law, and destroyed ancient Muslim shrines they considered ‘idolatrous’.
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