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 ...

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 ...

French and Malian soldiers regained control of the ancient city of Timbuktu on Monday, much to the joy of Timbuktu residents. But as the Islamist rebels who had taken it over fled, they torched a ...

When the Malian city of Timbuktu fell to Islamist rebels last April, the destruction of its immense cultural treasures did not begin at once. It wasn’t even clear, at first, who exactly was in charge ...

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 ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The Church publishes the Monitor ...

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 ...

WASHINGTON — “Our ceilings are not very tight,” says Abdel Haidara of the houses in his native Mali. He was talking recently at the Library of Congress in one of the library’s more ceremonial rooms.

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 ...