Nobody got punished for blowing up the giant Buddhist statues in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley in 2001. Nobody has been sent to jail for blowing up much of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria after the Islamic State group captured it in May 2015. (It was recaptured last March.) But Ahmed al-Mahdi is going to jail for a long time for destroying the religious monuments of Timbuktu, and he even says he's sorry.
Appearing before the International Criminal Court in The Hague on Monday, the former junior civil servant in Mali's department of education said: "All the charges brought against me are accurate and correct. I am really sorry, and I regret all the damage that my actions have caused."
He caused a lot of damage. Timbuktu is a remote desert outpost now, with fewer residents than the 25,000 students who thronged its famous Islamic university in its golden age in the 16th century. Its ancient mosques and monuments are of such historical value that they have earned Timbuktu (like Bamiyan and Palmyra) UNESCO's designation as a World Heritage site.
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