The fall came in stages. On June 13, 2012, fighters of the Tuareg separatist movement, the MNLA, clashed with militants of Ansar Dine at a checkpoint on the city's edge. The two had been uneasy allies against the Malian state; now they turned on each other. Ansar Dine, backed by foreign jihadist fighters and superior firepower, gave the separatists a deadline to leave. By June 29, the MNLA were gone and Ansar Dine controlled Timbuktu and much of northern Mali. For the residents, one armed occupation simply replaced another, and a stricter, more dangerous order settled over the streets.

Timbuktu was once called the City of 333 Saints, and its Sufi mausoleums were beloved shrines woven into daily life. The occupiers declared them idolatry. Beginning in late June, militants attacked the tombs with hoes, pick-axes, and chisels, destroying the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar and then others, one by one. They broke open a door at the Sidi Yahya Mosque that local belief held should stay shut until the end of days. A spokesman boasted that not a single mausoleum would remain. An imam offered money for repairs refused it, saying what had been done was beyond repair. These were not abstractions. They were the spiritual landmarks of people's grandparents, smashed in front of them.

But the occupiers did not get everything. Timbuktu's other treasure was its libraries, hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts on law, science, poetry, and faith. As the danger grew, the city's librarians and families launched a clandestine rescue. Led by the custodian Abdel Kader Haidara, they packed ancient texts into trunks and smuggled them out by night, hidden in mule carts and canoes, carrying more than 350,000 manuscripts to safety hundreds of miles south. When French and Malian forces retook the city in January 2013, retreating fighters set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute, destroying some 4,000 manuscripts. Even those had already been preserved in digital copies. The great archive of Timbuktu survived because its people would not let it burn.

The world did not look away. UNESCO, governments, and Islamic organizations condemned the destruction, many comparing it to the Taliban's dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The reckoning came at The Hague. In 2016 the International Criminal Court convicted Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, an Ansar Dine member, of the war crime of deliberately attacking historic and religious buildings, the first such conviction in the court's history. He was sentenced to nine years and ordered to pay millions in reparations to the people of Timbuktu. Then the masons went to work. Using the same earthen techniques that had built the city, they rebuilt the shattered mausoleums. The tombs stand again, and so does the city that mourned them.