4 Mali Hard-line Islamists destroyed historic Sufi tombs and the gate of a 600-year-old mosque in Timbuktu, an ancient Saharan city that fell to a separatist insurgency in March. Ansar Dine, a group of extremists with links to al-Qaeda, claimed it was following a "divine order" to destroy the tombs of Sufi Muslim saints. (Orthodox Muslims consider the veneration of graves to be idolatry.) The March military coup in Mali created a power vacuum in the West African nation that allowed rebel factions to seize much of the country's north.
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