A Reuters report indicates that some 20,000 books at the Ahmed Baba Institute may have been destroyed by the rebels, who have been fighting the government of the Saharan nation for about a year in the ...

“No. 2256. Copyist: Musa b. Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Kansusi from the area of Takrakar. Copied in 1144 H / 1731 G in Takrakar (Gao, Mali).” Robert Goldwater Library The main library in Timbuktu is full ...

GAO, Mali (Reuters) – French and Malian troops retook control of Timbuktu, a UNESCO World Heritage site, on Monday after Islamist rebel occupiers fled the ancient Sahara trading town and torched ...

Timbuktu conjures up images of long camel caravans out on the edge of the sand-strewn Sahara — a remoteness so legendary that the ancient city is still a byword for the end of the earth. The city ...

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — The Malian military government on Monday started returning home the historic manuscripts of Timbuktu, which were spirited out of their fabled northern city when it was occupied by ...

As the desert inches south into the city of Timbuktu, the sand settles on your skin and the air feels heavy in your lungs. When I travelled there nine years ago, the mythical city, home to the shrines ...

The Guardian reports that fleeing insurgents burned down two Timbuktu library buildings containing manuscripts dating back to the 13th century. According to the story, one of the destroyed buildings ...

For hundreds of years, Timbuktu has had a place in the world's imagination. Located on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, the city flourished as a center of Islamic culture and scholarship in the ...

When I visited Ahmed Baba two months later, the rows of wooden bookcases in the large, sunlit rooms were empty. The only traces of the ancient documents were a pile of mottled gray-and-black ashes, a ...

While French and Malian forces have taken control of Timbuktu's airport in what NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports may be a turning point in their fight against Islamist extremists, there's also word ...