Timbuktu

node · earth

The Malian desert city of the Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia mosques and sixteen mausoleums of saints, inscribed in 1988 as a centre of Islamic learning and of the trans-Saharan trade. Between roughly 30 June and 11 July 2012, during the occupation of northern Mali by armed groups, fourteen of the sixteen inscribed mausoleums and a mosque door were deliberately destroyed as idolatrous. The property was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2012. Reconstruction using traditional earthen technique, led by local masons with UNESCO support, began in 2014. The destruction produced the first conviction anywhere for cultural destruction as a war crime: Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi pleaded guilty at the International Criminal Court and was convicted on 27 September 2016.