Second Battle of Timbuktu According to French authorities, three Malian soldiers were killed in the fighting and a dozen more were wounded. Second Battle of Timbuktu The Battle of Timbuktu was a phase of the Northern Mali conflict, taking place in late March 2013, in which two Islamist attacks targeted the Malian army in Timbuktu. With help from the French, both attacks were prevented from capturing any significant sites in the city. On the night of March 20, French and Malian forces repelled two groups of Islamist militants - one attempting to infiltrate Timbuktu regional airport and the other attempting to forcibly enter the
Timbuktu Manuscripts being sold off. "Time" magazine related the account of an imam who picked up four of them for $50 each. In October 2008 one of the households was flooded, destroying 700 manuscripts. In 1970, UNESCO founded an organization which included among its tasks preservation of the manuscripts, but it went unfunded until 1977. In 1998, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates visited Timbuktu for his PBS series "Wonders of the African World". The series raised public and academic awareness of the manuscripts, which led to a pool of funding opening up. The "Timbuktu Manuscripts Project" was a project of the