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
History of Timbuktu Adams' account, more recent scholarship concludes that while Adams was almost certainly in Northern Africa, the discrepancies in his depiction of Timbuktu make it unlikely he ever visited the city. Three other Europeans reached the city before 1890: Heinrich Barth in 1853 and the German Oskar Lenz with the Spaniard Cristobal Benítez in 1880. After the scramble for Africa had been formalized in the Berlin Conference, land between the 14th meridian and Miltou, South-West Chad, became French territory, bounded in the south by a line running from Say, Niger to Baroua. Although the Timbuktu region was now French in name,