Sahara and Touaregs in NGM's september issue
 

In september issue of NatGeo magazine, there was a feature story about Touareg people inc. issues with rebelion, kidnappings etc...

The Sahara's Tuareg - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

Have you guys seen that? (Sorry if you've already commented it, i missed that)

Supposedly autor Peter Gwin and photographer Brent Stirton, managed to get inside the rebel crew north of Timboctou...

What do you think about that? You think that's authentic? How they managed to do that? (Some previous work from Brent Stirton is ethicaly dubious)

Cheers!
d.

Hi,

I don't think so, it sound more like northern Niger "...Tazerzaït, where the Aïr Massif meets the great sand seas of the Sahara"

Dominating people north of Timbouktu are Berabich, an Arab tribe; Touareg in NE Mali.

Peter Gwin wrote this piece from Tombouctoo earlier this year
Timbuktu - National Geographic Magazine
"...Finally, he mentioned the plight of the Frenchman. "I have heard the One-Eye has set a deadline."...
Most infamous among the groups is the one led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian leader of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Reputed to have lost an eye fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, he is known throughout the desert by his nom de guerre, Belaouer, Algerian-​French slang for the One-Eye. Since 2003, his men have kidnapped 47 Westerners. Until 2009, AQIM had reached deals to release all of its hostages, but when the United Kingdom refused to meet the group's demands for Edwin Dyer, a British tourist, he was executed—locals say beheaded. His body was never found. In the weeks before my arrival, Belaouer and his cohorts had acquired a new inventory of hostages: three Spanish aid workers, an Italian couple, and the Frenchman.

"Belaouer is very clever," the salt merchant empha*sized. He described how AQIM gained protection from the desert's Arab-speaking clans through Belaouer's marriage to the daughter of a powerful chief. One popular rumor describes him giving fuel and spare tires to a hapless Mali army patrol stranded in the desert. Such accounts have won him sympathizers among Timbuktu's minority Arab community, which in turn has angered the city's dominant ethnic groups, the Tuareg and Songhai.
...
I asked him why the Mali army did not mount an offensive against the terrorists. He pointed the red ember of his cigarette toward a cluster of houses a few streets over and described how Belaouer's men had assassinated an army colonel in front of his young family in that neighborhood a few months earlier. "Everyone in Timbuktu heard the shots," he said quietly. He mimicked the sound, bang, bang, bang. Then he waved the cigarette over the constellation of electric lights that revealed the shape of the city. "The One-Eye has eyes everywhere." And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "I'm sure he knows you are here."

Here you find a nice collection of Gwin's writings from Sahara
Al Qaeda, Drug Cartels Threaten Mali and Niger Deserts | Pulitzer Center