BAMAKO, June 30: Al Qaeda-linked militants in northern Mali went on the rampage in Timbuktu on Saturday, destroying ancient tombs of saints just after Unesco listed the fabled city as an endangered world heritage site.

The onslaught by armed militants from the Ansar Dine group was launched amid the unrest in Mali’s vast desert in the north that erupted in the chaotic aftermath of a March 22 coup in Bamako.

“They have ravaged Timbuktu today. It is a crime,” said a source close to an imam in Timbuktu, known as the “City of 333 Saints”.

Witnesses said the Islamists, holding parts of northern Mali, have so far destroyed three ancient shrines.

“The tombs of Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi Moctar and Alpha Moya in Timbuktu were destroyed on Saturday by the Islamists... who are heading towards other tombs,” said one witness, whose report was confirmed by the source close to the imam.

“The mausoleum doesn’t exist any more and the cemetery is as bare as a soccer pitch,” local teacher Abdoulaye Boulahi said of the Mahmoud burial place.

“There’s about 30 of them breaking everything up with pick-axes and hoes. They’ve put their Kalashnikovs down by their side. These are shocking scenes for the people in Timbuktu.”

In addition to three historic mosques, Timbuktu is home to 16 cemeteries and mausoleums, according to the Unesco website.

Ansar Dine, one of the armed groups seizing control in northern Mali, has said no site would be safe in Timbuktu.

“Ansar Dine will today destroy every mausoleum in the city. All of them, without exception,” spokesman Sanda Ould Boumama said through an interpreter from the city.

The Ansar Dine spokesman suggested Saturday’s action was in retaliation to the Unesco decision on Thursday to put the World Heritage site, a cradle of Islamic learning founded in the fifth century, on its endangered list.

“God is unique. All of this is haram (or forbidden in Islam). We are all Muslims. Unesco is what?” he said, declaring that Ansar Dine — which wants to impose Sharia law in the region — was acting “in the name of God”.

Witnesses in Timbuktu said the gangs had destroyed the mausoleum of a saint whose 15th century tomb was already desecrated in May by members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), another of the groups in control in the north.

The destruction in Mali is reminiscent of the Taliban blowing up the giant Buddhas of the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan — an ancient Buddhist and world heritage site on the Silk Road — in March 2001 after branding them un-Islamic.

Mali has been gripped by chaos since disgruntled troops swarmed the capital Bamako in the south in March and ousted the elected president of what had been seen as one of Africa’s model democracies.

Islamist and tribal Tuareg groups seized on the power vacuum and pushed government forces out of northern Mali, an area the size of France and Belgium, including Timbuktu and the cities of Gao and Kidal.—AFP