Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi
Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was a member of Ansar Dine, a Tuareg Islamist militia in North Africa. Al-Mahdi admitted guilt in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2016 for the war crime of attacking religious and historical buildings in the Malian city of Timbuktu. Al-Mahdi was the first person convicted by the ICC for such a crime, and in general the first individual to ever be prosecuted solely on the basis of cultural crimes. He was sentenced to nine years in prison. On 25 November 2021, his sentence was commuted to 7 years in prison, and he was released on 18 September 2022.
Al-Mahdi was born approximately in 1975 in Agoune, Mali, which is 97 km west of Timbuktu. In 2011, he was a civil servant in the Malian government. He is an ethnic Tuareg and during the Northern Mali conflict, that began in 2012, he was a member of Ansar Dine. Al-Mahdi worked closely with the leaders of Ansar Dine and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, when the two groups controlled Timbuktu. Specifically, he enforced decisions of the Islamic Court of Timbuktu and from May to September 2012, he ran the "Manners' Brigade".
The ICC opened a formal investigation on Mali, after referral of the situation by Mali to the Prosecutor, on 16 January 2013 to investigate alleged crimes, that occurred since January 2012 in the context of an armed conflict in the north of the country. The court issued an arrest warrant for al-Mahdi on 18 September 2015. The arrest warrant alleges, that from about 30 June 2012 to 10 July 2012 in Timbuktu, al-Mahdi committed the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against historical monuments or buildings dedicated to religion. The case against al-Mahdi represented the first time, the ICC had indicted an individual for the war crime of attacking religious buildings or historical monuments and it was the first case, before the ICC arising out of the situation in Mali. The arrest warrant listed ten monuments in Timbuktu, at least one of which is a World Heritage Site, that al-Mahdi attacked:
