The strangers at the corner table may seem mysterious, but, here in Timbuktu, their identity has become something of an open secret: They are U.S. Special Forces. What's far less clear is exactly what they do when they leave the hotel and strike out over the dunes. "We're not authorized to talk to the press, sir," one of them responds when I sidle over to their table and introduce myself.
For centuries, the word "Timbuktu" has been a metaphor for the end of the earth. But, now, this desolate patch of mud mosques and mud-brick houses at the southern fringe of the Sahara has assumed an unlikely new identity: a focal point in the global war on terrorism. According to Western diplomats and Malian officials in Bamako, Mali's capital, Islamic terrorist groups have come to regard the poorly controlled, sparsely populated region north of Timbuktu as both fertile ground for recruitment and as a potential site for training camps, modeled after the secret enclaves set up by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Concerned about the radical threat in Mali, the Bush administration has been sending teams of Special Forces to Timbuktu and Gao, an oasis 250 miles to the east, to train Malian troops in counterterrorism and to conduct their own operations.
After a rocky start that one American diplomat attributes to bureaucratic rivalry and a clash of strategies for fighting terrorism, the State and Defense departments are cooperating closely in the Sahel, the vast region bordering the southern Sahara. Military training and border patrols have gone hand in hand with an ambitious outreach program run by diplomats in Tuareg villages along the old salt route between Mali and Algeria. But the Islamic extremists in Mali aren't giving up easily. Repeating a pattern seen in other countries, such as Kenya, they are marrying into the local population and buying support among sheiks and imams, quietly spreading the message of jihad.
The roots of the problem in Mali's north go back at least 15 years, when Tuareg nomads, frustrated by years of drought and the failure of the Malian government to come to their aid, rose in armed rebellion. After a series of peace accords, the uprising ended in 1996, and the Tuaregs surrendered hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles, which were buried in the concrete pedestal of a "Monument to Peace" that sits on a rise on Timbuktu's outskirts. But the final agreement was essentially a face-saving device for the Malian government, which had neither the funds nor the manpower to continue fighting. Malian authorities agreed to draw down their military presence in the region north of Timbuktu, and diplomats say there was also a tacit understanding that they would not interfere with the Tuaregs' traditional source of income, the smuggling of contraband across the porous desert borders. After the Malian army retreated in the mid-'90s, the area became an ever wilder no-man's-land, and radical elements moved into the vacuum.