Whiskey-Drinking Rocker to West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
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WSJ
Apr 01, 2025 10:23 AM IST
A militant leader from Mali championed a rock band and helped write a hit song before leading an Islamist army that killed tens of thousands.
Back in the day, Iyad ag Ghali wrote lyrics for a flamboyant blues-rock band from the heart of the Sahara. He jammed with the guys in the group, pounding out the beat on metal jerrycans, and frequented West African nightclubs.
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader PREMIUM
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
The group, Tinariwen, went on to tour the world, win a Grammy and play with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and U2’s Bono.
Ag Ghali went on to become the leader of one of the most dangerous al Qaeda franchises in the world, banning music in a swath of West Africa the size of Montana and commanding an army of extremists responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Ag Ghali’s gunmen even ambushed Tinariwen band members and abducted the guitar player.
“I could not believe it,” said the band’s former manager, Manny Ansar, who went clubbing with ag Ghali in Mali’s capital, Bamako, 30 years ago. “It was a huge shock when I saw footage of him walking over corpses.”
Ag Ghali has turned West Africa into the primary battlefield where the West and local governments have clashed with Islamist extremists. His 6,000 fighters have rampaged through villages and battled French soldiers, American Green Berets and Russian mercenaries.
It is a fight the 70 or so year-old ag Ghali is winning. His militants have become so powerful that there is a risk that Mali, his home country, or neighboring Burkina Faso could become the world’s first nation ruled by al Qaeda.
Ag Ghali’s journey from World Music promoter to Islamist warlord followed as unlikely a trajectory as his friends’ rise from fireside jam sessions to the global stage.
This account of his transformation draws on interviews with former friends, Tuareg rebels, Tinariwen band members and managers and government officials, as well as U.N. reports, U.S. diplomatic communications and contemporaneous photos.
Desert boys
As a young man, ag Ghali was a Tuareg first and a Muslim second.
The Tuareg, a Berber ethnic group, have been romanticized in the West for their indigo garb and nomadic lifestyle, wandering the Sahara with their camels, goats and sheep, across what is now Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Algeria and Libya. They resisted almost 70 years of colonial domination by France. After Mali gained independence in 1960, they staged a failed rebellion against the new government.
Ag Ghali was nine years old when his father, prominent among Tuareg families, was killed in the uprising. As he grew up, ag Ghali joined a legion of Tuareg volunteers, under the patronage of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, seeking independence from Mali.
A 1992 photo of Ibrahim ag Alhabib playing guitar in Mali.
Gadhafi used the Tuareg to further his own geopolitical ambitions, dispatching ag Ghali and others to fight the Israelis in Lebanon and the French in Chad.
In the 1980s, Gadhafi asked ag Ghali to supervise Tuareg recruits at a camp near Tripoli, Libya. Among the volunteers were musicians, including Ibrahim ag Alhabib, whose father, like ag Ghali’s, had been killed in the 1960s Mali rebellion.
As a boy, ag Alhabib had been captivated by a guitar-strumming cowboy in a Western screened at a makeshift desert cinema. He fashioned his first guitar out of an oil can, stick and bicycle-brake cable. As he mastered the instrument, ag Alhabib absorbed the music of Elvis, James Brown, Malian star Ali Farka Touré and Arab pop musicians. Around the campfire at night, ag Alhabib and other Tuareg musicians forged their own desert-blues sound.
Ag Ghali saw music as a way to rally support for Tuareg independence. He helped supply ag Alhabib and the musicians with electric guitars and amplifiers, a warehouse for rehearsals and a concrete stage to perform, said Philippe Brix, the band’s second manager.
Ag Ghali crafted lyrics for a song called “Bismillah,” Arabic for “In the Name of God.”
In the name of God, we started the revolution in the company of my brothers.
To drive out the looters and trample the enemies,
We will climb the mountains to escape misery.
Ag Ghali “understood the power of guitar music as a communication tool,” said Brix. “It was his masterstroke.” The musicians named their band Kel Tinariwen, the Desert Boys.
Pierre Boilley, a Tuareg-focused academic, said he hosted ag Ghali at his Paris apartment in 1989, where his guest spent evenings sipping whiskey and plotting a Tuareg uprising.
Ag Ghali eventually soured on Gadhafi, who put his own agenda ahead of Tuareg independence. “Gadhafi had promised for years to help,” Ansar recalled ag Ghali saying. “But he kept on sending us to fight other wars.”
In June 1990**,** ag Ghali and his fighters left Libya and slipped into Mali. They raided military posts during the day and sang fireside at night.
Bootleg cassettes of “Bismillah” passed hand to hand in Malian settlements, and the song became an anthem of the Tuareg liberation movement. It was ag Ghali’s song, said Abdallah ag Alhousseyni, a guitarist in the group since its early days.
“One can say Tinariwen was behind the uprising,” the band’s bass player, Eyadou ag Leche, later told the French newspaper Le Monde.
After initial battlefield wins, ag Ghali negotiated a 1991 peace that led to increased Tuareg autonomy from Malian authorities.
It was the start of a two-decade alliance between ag Ghali and the Bamako government.
City life
The fighting over, Malian President Moussa Traoré asked Ansar, a Tuareg and popular man-about-town in Bamako, to host ag Ghali for a dinner.
Ansar archived Tuareg music as a hobby, and he hit it off with ag Ghali, who thought Tinariwen needed a manager. The following year, ag Ghali invited Ansar to the Algerian Sahara and introduced him to band members, who were playing guitar on a carpet in the shade of a tree.
“I am entrusting this band to you,” Ansar recalled ag Ghali saying.
Traoré was overthrown by the military in 1991, in response to the killing of pro-democracy protesters. The new president, Alpha Konaré, hoping to keep a lid on the restive Tuaregs, gave ag Ghali a spacious villa in Bamako.
Soldiers involved in the 1991 putsch led by Malian Lt. Col. Amadou Toumani Touré against President Moussa Traoré. Both leaders cultivated ties with Iyad ag Ghali before he launched an Islamist insurgency against the government two decades later.
Ag Ghali invited Tinariwen’s founder to live in the house. The band stayed up late rehearsing and Ag Ghali sang along, keeping the beat on a water can.
President Konaré asked ag Ghali to join him on official trips to the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and elsewhere. The desert rebel began wearing a Rolex watch, Weston loafers and Smalto suits, gifts from their international hosts, Ansar said.
Ag Ghali and Ansar cranked Bob Marley songs as they drove to nightclubs, where Ag Ghali chain-smoked Marlboros, but drank only orange juice, Ansar said.
In 1999, a group of conservative Pakistani preachers arrived in ag Ghali’s hometown of Kidal, in northern Mali, and his life changed.
Ditch the Rolex
The Pakistanis, bearded and dressed in white, marched through Kidal, exhorting residents to strictly follow the tenets of Islam. Some Tuareg women booed them.
Ag Ghali, though, was intrigued and invited the Pakistanis to his home. Over the following months, he spent more time praying and reading the Quran. He grew a beard and began wearing the same white garb as the preachers.
“I’m ditching my Rolex and my shoes,” Ansar recalled ag Ghali saying. “I can’t wear them anymore.”
Ag Ghali’s growing attraction to an extreme version of Islam and his love of Tuareg music coexisted peacefully for a while. In 1999, the same year the Pakistani preachers came to town, he urged Ansar to organize concerts of Tuareg music, which eventually morphed into the Festival in the Desert.
Among those who attended the first festival in 2001 was U.S. Ambassador to Mali Michael Ranneberger. He was mesmerized by the swaying Tuareg dancers and starry nights in camel-skin tents, according to his written recollections.
Later that year, “Bismillah” appeared on Tinariwen’s first commercially released album. Others are credited for the song, but band managers said ag Ghali wrote most of the lyrics.
In 2003, Vicki Huddleston, then U.S. ambassador to Mali, arranged a meeting with ag Ghali, part of a Bush administration effort to track radicals after the Sept. 11 attacks. “We had intelligence al Qaeda was about to open a new front” in the region, said Huddleston, who suspected ag Ghali was behind the move.
Huddleston was charmed by the charismatic, “good-looking guy” wearing a turban that “made him look the part of a romantic Tuareg.” But when he denied flirting with radicalism, she said, “I knew he was lying.”
Ag Ghali eventually renounced the music festival he had championed. “Stop this,” Ansar remembered him saying. “You are bringing non-Muslims for debauchery.”
The festival’s popularity, and Tinariwen’s, swelled. In 2010, the band performed alongside Shakira and Alicia Keys at the World Cup in South Africa.
Tinariwen performing at the FIFA World Cup Kick-Off concert on June 10, 2010, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
In 2011, Tinariwen released its Grammy-winning album, “Tassili,” and Libyan leader Gadhafi was overthrown. Tuareg fighters left Libya and flooded into Mali. Many younger Tuareg turned on ag Ghali, seeing him as a sellout who lived in luxury and cozied up to Mali’s government.
Sidelined by former comrades, ag Ghali founded his own Islamist militant group.
The slow-motion implosion of West Africa soon followed.
Silenced
The last Festival in the Desert held in Mali took place on the outskirts of Timbuktu, where Tinariwen shared the stage with Bono, of the Irish band U2.
The final curtain fell on Jan. 14, 2012. Two days later, ag Ghali’s former Tuareg rebel group launched a rebellion, later seizing Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal.
Bono, in black shirt, with Manny Ansar, bottom, before flying out of Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012 after playing the Festival in the Desert with Tinariwen.
Within months, ag Ghali’s new Islamist group and another extremist force, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, drove the Tuareg into retreat.
After seizing Timbuktu, ag Ghali banned what he called the “music of Satan.” Women were barred for going outdoors without their husbands or brothers. Religious police whipped suspected heretics.
“They installed the rule that when a man joined the fighters, he ‘got’ a woman,” International Criminal Court prosecutors wrote later. The men beat and raped their new wives, as well as other women, prosecutors alleged.
In early 2013, ag Ghali’s militants ambushed Tinariwen musicians and held guitarist Abdallah ag Lamida for weeks after catching him trying to retrieve his instruments.
Iyad ag Ghali, right, during a 2012 meeting with Burkina Faso Foreign Minister Djibril Bassole in Kidal, Mali.
The U.S. designated ag Ghali a terrorist that year. France deployed combat troops to Mali and, backed by Malian soldiers and logistical support from the U.S. and others, dislodged the Islamists from Timbuktu. For ag Ghali, it was a setback, not a loss.
In 2017, he drew several al Qaeda-linked militant groups into a coalition called Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin, which translates as Support Group for Islam and Muslims. The coalition launched a new wave of insurgency across West Africa.
Ag Ghali’s men seized gold mines, extorted villagers for their cattle and took protection money from drug- and human-traffickers. The militants were linked to almost 2,300 violent incidents in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and other West African countries last year, leaving more than 8,880 people dead, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank in the Pentagon’s National Defense University. The center analyzes data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit monitoring service.
The militant coalition didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Frustrated military officers in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger overthrew civilian rulers in a series of coups starting in 2020, claiming they were better able to defeat the insurgents.
The coups upended the West’s counterinsurgency strategy in West Africa. Over the past three years, the juntas have evicted French counterterrorism forces. Niger’s military rulers ordered 1,100 U.S. troops out of the country and took over a $110 million American drone base.
Mali booted a 15,000-strong United Nations force and hired Russian Wagner Group mercenaries to provide security. The Russians have been accused of massacring civilians, and ag Ghali has sought popular support by opposing Moscow’s presence. In July, ag Ghali’s forces joined a Tuareg attack in northern Mali that killed at least 50 Wagner fighters, the company’s biggest single loss in Africa.
Benin, Ivory Coast and Togo, relatively stable countries on the Gulf of Guinea coast, are struggling to fend off insurgents pouring across their northern borders.
Ag Ghali, recalling the backlash to his heavy-handed rule in Timbuktu, has made some effort to soften the image of his militant coalition and assume the trappings of government, suggesting an ambition to establish a West African caliphate.
His fighters have fended off Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, a rival group that has executed village elders and demanded fealty from residents. Ag Ghali’s protection comes at a price: In one village in central Mali, it was 40 cows and 130 pounds of sorghum a year. In exchange, ag Ghali’s men settle disputes among hunters, fishermen, nomadic herders and farmers, who squabble over grazing lands and water resources.
“It’s safe,” said Ibrahim Cisse, a Malian community leader. “But it’s a prison.”
The threat of violence is never far from the surface. Last August, ag Ghali’s militants gunned down some 600 villagers in Barsalogho, Burkina Faso, as the residents dug defensive trenches to try to protect their settlement, according to a French intelligence report.
In June, the International Criminal Court in The Hague unsealed an arrest warrant for ag Ghali, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. He remains at large.
Last summer, Tinariwen performed in U.S. cities, including Boston and Los Angeles.
Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com and Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
West Africa
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