Go! Go! Go!" the American soldiers shout. The Malian troops fall to the sand and begin firing, their AK-47s slamming back into their shoulders with each shot. Then one of the men releases his trigger and glances back, uncertain of what to do next. "Go!" the Americans shout again, and the man stands, runs to the next station, and takes aim once more.

The three U.S. soldiers leading the exercise are in full battle gear—desert fatigues and boots, body armor, Kevlar helmets, and Oakley sunglasses. They carry M4 carbines, and each has a 9-millimeter pistol strapped to his thigh or holstered on his hip. They have removed their names and ranks from their uniforms, leaving only an American flag on their sleeves. An armored Humvee stands guard nearby.

We are a few miles outside Timbuktu, Mali, where the U.S. Army has given Vanity Fair permission to observe a Special Forces team train local troops to battle al-Qaeda terrorists. The army has sent about two dozen soldiers from its European base in Germany as part of the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a five-year, $500 million program designed to help countries in the Sahara Desert thwart extremists who have set up bases in the area. U.S. military officials have estimated that as many as a quarter of the suicide bombers in Iraq come from or are trained in the Sahara region. As a result, helping West and North African armies secure their territories—making them less hospitable to radical groups—has become a top American foreign-policy objective. With its vast uninhabited spaces crisscrossed by country borders that are almost entirely unsupervised, the Sahara Desert, which is larger than the continental United States, may be the most lawless zone on the planet.

The Special Forces soldiers who lead these missions are some of the most highly trained fighters in the army. They specialize in unconventional warfare and since 9/11 have played a central role in worldwide counterterrorism operations. They work in small teams, often covertly, and they are fond of referring to the "small footprint" they leave behind in foreign lands. Before the army would grant me and a V.F. photographer embedded slots with the Special Forces team in Timbuktu, the magazine had to agree not to print the names of any of the trainers or to publish images of soldiers whose eyes were not shaded from view. "We have to watch out for the safety of our guys," an official with the army told me. "And for their wives and children back home."

Most of the 70-odd Malian trainees on the shooting range are dressed in jungle camouflage—splotches of green and black that stand out against the desert backdrop of sand and acacias. The majority of them wear soft military caps; others have wrapped their heads in traditional turbans, which dangle like scarves as they run from station to station. The soldiers are said to be some of Mali's fighting elite, but many of their shots fly wide of the targets. The bullets make a twangy noise as they bounce off sand dunes and whizz away into the distance.

Off to the side of the range, a Special Forces medic in his late 20s is arguing about fighting tactics with a Malian officer who is perhaps 30 years his senior. The medic, on hand in case anyone gets shot, has seen his share of combat, including a firefight in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. "The most important thing is that while you're running, the gun's safety must be on," he says, his eyes bulging. "Otherwise it's dangerous. You run, then as you get into position to fire, you undo the safety. It doesn't take any more time. It doesn't slow you down at all."

Alher Metky, a division commander in the Malian army, shakes his head and waves off the instruction with a dismissive smile. "C'est bon, c'est bon," he says between puffs on a Dunhill. "For the sake of safety, that's fine, but in combat it's impossible. It takes too much time."

With yellow foam plugs jammed into his ears, the medic shouts a little more loudly than necessary. He has been speaking in passable French, but as he grows more exasperated, he switches back to English and relies on a translator to get his points across. "Look, it takes no time," he insists, ditching his M4 for a scuffed-up AK-47, hoping his point will be better made with the gun the Mali troops use. He drops from upright to one knee, then flops prone on the sand, his thumb swiftly disengaging the safety as he moves into shooting position.

But Metky folds his arms across his chest and smiles again, his tobacco-stained teeth appearing as little brown nubs below his salt-and-pepper mustache. The medic gets up from the sand, retrieves his M4, and squares up to the commander. "Tell him that I've engaged hundreds of combatants effectively and I always do it this way," he says to the translator. "I never run with the safety off."

The translator relays this to the commander in French: "He says he's taken on thousands of enemies, and he always does it this way, and he always wins."

Metky is still not convinced. "Oui, oui, but it won't work in combat. The enemy would hear you release the safety. It would give your position away."

That draws a quick laugh from the medic. "If you're in combat, there'll be so much shooting you won't hear someone's safety click," he says. "Noise is immaterial."

Over at the targets, the U.S. troops have stripped the Malians of their ammunition as they try to hammer home the basics of the drill. Now the Malians are running with bulletless guns, each man shouting "Boom! Boom!" instead of actually firing. The day's session has been under way for only a couple hours, but some of the trainees are tired and losing focus. A few of them wander off to urinate on a bush. Others nap in the shade of a truck.

The Special Forces team leader, who has taken a hands-off approach to the drills thus far, leaving the instruction to his men, now stands from his sideline crouch and prepares to join the group. "What's going on over there?" he asks. "Things getting out of hand? Do I have to step in, do my Lawrence of Arabia thing?"

A 29-year-old captain from the Hudson Valley, in upstate New York, the team leader is tall, square-jawed, and muscled like a football player—he played linebacker as an undergraduate at Furman University, in South Carolina. He walks with a swagger, often invokes the tone of a motivational speaker, and claims to sleep only three or four hours a night. "Sleep is unnecessary," he tells me late one night as he inspects gear on the Special Forces base. "It's a crutch." He has also sworn off television. "I watch two hours and I can feel my head getting stupider," he says.

"In Africa—in Mali, in this case—the biggest thing is to prepare them to battle their terrorist elements on their own so that we don't have to worry about sending in American troops," the captain tells me on the range. "They go through these drills when they first join the army, but that's it. They feel like they've done it. It's not like the U.S. Army, which trains all the time. This is a different culture." He adds, "We can train them, but we can't make them care."

The captain's men stop the drill and call the troops into a huddle. One of the instructors addresses the group: "It's very important that the chief of each line stays back. He has to be able to see the big picture. They need to learn how to lead. And I know you're tired, but don't forget about safety!"

A Malian lieutenant rubs his face and eyes with fatigue and translates. "He says we have to be—oh, what's the word, je ne sais pas—prudent!"

An American senior weapons sergeant, a 31-year-old from North Carolina, reports to the captain as the other soldier continues shouting at the Malians. "They're not quite getting it, the whole moving-line idea. I think it's lost in translation," he says.

"Yeah, well, explain it again," says the captain. "But I think they're getting the essentials. The foundation is there. Tell him not to get so frustrated. He can't show that he's upset, or they'll be insulted. I don't want to lose them." As the weapons sergeant relays the message, the captain hovers on the edge of the group, throwing out occasional words of encouragement.

The soldier giving the lecture is on his knees, surrounded by Malians. "O.K., I'm going to explain this one more time!" he shouts, sketching out the battle plan by sticking bullets in the sand. "Now let's fucking do this!"

As gunshots ring out again, I walk over to Commander Metky and ask him about the terror threat in the Sahara. He opens a new pack of cigarettes, lights one, and throws the crumpled cellophane wrapper to the ground. "This is an incredibly vast region, and to assure the security of our people, we need the materials and money necessary to fight," he says. "We need helicopters to better monitor the territory. We hope the Americans will continue to help us, but not just with these training sessions. Wherever you find Americans helping, the country does well. They get money. They get food. They get development."

Over the last 12 years, I have traveled and worked in more than a dozen West African countries—in the mid-90s as a Peace Corps volunteer and since then as a journalist—and I've frequently heard similar talk from local soldiers, rebels, and civilians, all of them hopeful that I might somehow persuade the American government to pay attention to their plight. Metky is in the enviable position of actually having the U.S. military's ear.

"The threat of these terrorists is very real," Metky says. "They've taken refuge in our country and have the necessary means to wage war. Every time we try to confront them, they disappear and resurface elsewhere—in Mauritania, Algeria, Niger, Chad. Then when we come back home to our base, they return to northern Mali. We absolutely have to work together on this. One single country can do nothing alone. We are soldiers of this land. We know how to fight. This is my Sahara. But to get the enemy I need more money."

Timbuktu was founded by Tuareg nomads around the 11th century. It is located near the northernmost point of the Niger River, which slices through West Africa from Guinea to Nigeria in a 2,500-mile-long crescent. From the 14th century to the 16th, Timbuktu was an important center of Islamic teaching, attracting black Africans from the south as well as Arabs from the Middle East. In the late 1500s the city was conquered by Moroccan warriors, and soon shipping along the West African coast began to prosper, sharply reducing Timbuktu's importance. The city has been in decline ever since.

Today it has a population of about 30,000, a mix of black Africans, Tuaregs, and Moors, descendants of the Arabs who spread across North Africa from the Middle East. The poorest live in domed tents, erected out of scraps of canvas and tree-branch stakes. Others have adobe homes, many of them hundreds of years old, with walls more than a foot thick to block out the blazing heat. The streets are sand-choked and seem forever to be filling with even more sand, carried by the hot wind that blows in from the Sahara. It may seem an unlikely spot for a counterterrorism base, but the army says it is well placed for training the soldiers who must monitor the vast desert to the north—an area about the size of Texas.

Lately there has been a surge in terrorist attacks in the Sahara region. In December 2006, bombers attacked a convoy of employees of a Halliburton affiliate near Algiers, killing an Algerian truck driver and injuring nine workers, including three British citizens and one American. In March and April of this year, a series of suicide bombings killed more than 30 people in Morocco and Algeria. And in July a truck bomb killed 8 soldiers and wounded more than 20 when it exploded in an Algerian army barracks just before the opening of the All Africa Games, an event often referred to as Africa's Olympics, which Algeria hosted this year. The attackers have been linked to the most feared extremist organization in the Sahara, known until recently as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. The G.S.P.C. (its common French abbreviation) emerged in the late 1990s out of the Algerian civil war, and was tied to groups that sought to replace Algeria's secular government with an Islamic state. Last year on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, endorsed the group, saying, "We pray to God that our brothers from the G.S.P.C. succeed in causing harm to the top members of the crusader coalition, and particularly their leader, the vicious America."

The G.S.P.C. released an official response three days later: "We pledge our allegiance to Sheikh Osama bin Laden.… Our soldiers are at his call so that he may strike whom and where he likes." Then, in January of this year, the G.S.P.C. officially changed its name to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (A.Q.I.M.).

The Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership is run by the U.S. European Command (eucom), based in Stuttgart, Germany, and was established as a cooperative effort with nine countries in West and North Africa—Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. The commander of the Special Operations division, navy rear admiral William McRaven, was a seal in the late 1970s, was deployed to the Middle East for Desert Storm in the early 1990s, and later was assigned to the National Security Council, where he helped draft U.S. strategy for dealing with hostage crises and terrorism.

"The reason we are down there is to help the host nation deal with what we think is a threat—particularly the A.Q.I.M. threat," McRaven told me. "What we're doing is building up the host nation's capacity and letting them deal with their own security problems. This is what's going to make them more stable. And I think it's a great long-term strategy that will apply in Africa and in many other areas of the world as well."

Local unrest has made counterterrorism activities problematic in such places as Mauritania and Chad. And although Mali is considered one of West Africa's most promising and stable democracies, it shares a long border with Algeria, whose superior army has forced many A.Q.I.M. militants to relocate to northern Mali, where they have adopted a nomadic way of life, frequently breaking camp and switching locales. Mali's vast north is strategic because of the country's long history of trans-Saharan trade routes, which today are used for the illegal trafficking of cigarettes, arms, people, and drugs. Together, these factors have made eucom more active in Mali than anywhere else in the Sahara region. Special Forces teams are sent to Timbuktu two or three times a year, for four to six weeks at a stretch. Their work in the Sahara is similar to other U.S. military counterterrorism efforts further east, in the Horn of Africa.

"This is all about getting ahead of the problem," McRaven said. "It's really about bringing stability to Africa. It's our long-term hope that by working with them we can create a more stable environment. And that means all sorts of things to the global community. It means less brain drain from Africa. It means less illegal migration. It means better general relationships with all the countries. Africa is a very vital part of the global community. We do not want to see Africa go the way of other countries where extremism is on the rise."

The State Department and the Pentagon began counterterrorism activities with countries in the Sahara region about a year after the September 11 attacks. Poorly funded in the beginning, the initiative didn't evolve into the more robust current operation until the arrival of air-force general Charles Wald, the deputy commander of eucom from December 2002 until his retirement in July 2006. "The critics would say you're only training militaries to be better at performing coups," Wald told me. "But either you sit back and wait for the crisis to occur and then show up and be the 9-1-1 force, or you help build capacity. That's really the issue for the United States in places that have huge potential to be a breeding ground for threats. And North Africa is a very volatile and dangerous place unless there is some capacity put in place to control that. If you do prevention like I'm talking about, it costs about one-tenth of what it does for crisis response. Initially, in the Bush administration, there was a tendency to try to withdraw from engagement. Now they've agreed that you have to be actively engaged to make a difference."

Wald's idea to combat terrorism by ramping up engagement with African armies was initially met with eye rolling in the Bush administration. Now, in perhaps the ultimate nod to what some consider Wald's foresight—others fear it is a sign of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy—the Pentagon is creating an Africa command base, africom, that will be modeled on eucom and the four other regional military commands worldwide. Its location has yet to be determined, but it is slated to be up and running by September 2008, and will direct counterterrorism operations on the continent. American officials had little success drumming up support on a trip to Africa in June, when the governments of Libya, Algeria, and Morocco reportedly rejected U.S. proposals to locate the base in their territories.

"People thought we were looking for attention and work, because people are cynical," Wald said of his early concerns regarding terrorism in the Sahara. "People said that we were overstating the threat, that we were alarmist, that it was unrealistic, that in fact our involvement was going to be counterproductive, that we were going to cause North African civilians as well as governments to resent us. I don't believe that. I think we had it right."

Avoiding another Iraq or Afghanistan is the ultimate goal, Wald said. "This needs to be a different approach to what the military does. It ought to be capacity building and governance building. There's a lot of money going into Africa, and a lot of people care. But it's just not being coordinated properly. It's time to start facing the fact that we've got to do this in a holistic, synergistic way. It's going to take time—50 years at least."

We are on the road with the Special Forces by seven a.m. The captain is wearing a new bracelet that he ordered from a Tuareg artisan in town—a thick band of etched silver with an inlaid scorpion made of ebony. He starts us off with some precautionary instructions and indicates the weaponry in the Land Cruiser: an M4 carbine between the front seats and a machine gun with its tripod in the back. "If we see bandits, we let the Malians handle it," he says. "It's their country. They're trained. They know what to do."

I look out the window at our convoy. A dozen or so Malian soldiers, each carrying a battered AK-47, have climbed onto the beds of two pickup trucks that are spray-painted in imitation camouflage. Next to the trucks are two armored U.S. Army Humvees. A Special Forces soldier is sitting on the roof turret of one of them, manning a .50-caliber machine gun. Behind him an anti-tank missile launcher is strapped to the roof.

We are heading south about 30 miles to the village of Darsalam, where U.S. and Malian troops will be giving medical treatment to residents. As our convoy rolls onto a ferry barge to cross the Niger River, fishermen pole their dugout canoes out over the flat water. Near the dock, a crippled child finishes his river bath and pulls himself into a wheelchair that sits in the mud. A group of his friends then push him up the steep dirt bank.

It takes nearly two hours to reach Darsalam, which is little more than a gathering of roadside lean-tos, woven together from pieces of tarp and staked into a wasted landscape of sand and the occasional scrubby bush. It is midmorning when we arrive, and about 300 villagers are gathered under two shelters—one for the men, the other for the women and children. A blowtorch wind is swirling across the desert, and the temperature rises to 115 degrees. Later in the day, one of the Special Forces guys will dump a packet of ramen noodles into his sun-heated water bottle for an instant snack of hot soup.

As the soldiers set up cots and medical supplies under a tent, the captain speaks to the villagers. "Good morning," he says to the men with a smile. "Why is it so hot here?" The men, most of their faces covered in turban wraps, just stare. He tries again with the women. "I don't think I've ever seen so many beautiful babies in one spot," he says through a translator. Again, no response. "Well, the reason we're here is to help benefit this particular region regarding medicine and curing basic ailments," he explains. "We deem it necessary to come here and help promote healthier people. It also allows us to work very closely with your military. Then they will get an idea for how to do this for their own people in the future." Everyone claps.

It is a long and difficult day. The soldiers treat the villagers for malnutrition, malaria, stomach worms, and various other infections. "We're targeting mostly kids," a medic tells me. "We're not dealing a lot with older people—adults with arthritis, cancer, chronic stuff that can't be cured. We want to minimize having to say 'We can't help you.'"

Still, for some there is little that can be done. Kadi, a 16-year-old girl with a shy, blank look in her eyes, is led into the tent by her parents. They sit close together on a plastic woven mat. Kadi got sick last year, her father says, when a bad strain of malaria killed several people in town. Her fever topped 110 degrees, and she hasn't been the same since. "Now she doesn't speak anymore. She won't walk or lie down on her own," her father says. "She says she sees devils."

The doctor tells the parents that she probably contracted cerebral malaria, which has permanently damaged her brain. "We have vitamins for her nutrition, but there's nothing we can do to cure her," he says. A Malian soldier translates the bad news. The father nods; Kadi stares absently at the ground. Her mother holds her from behind, stroking the girl's peach-colored wrap.

"Everyone thinks Special Forces is all weapons and fancy technology. But it's really a thinking man's game," says the captain. "The regular army can't do this stuff." At the end of the day the village chief leads the captain to the town's well, which has partially collapsed. "There's all these non-governmental organizations fighting to find work, and here's some real work," the captain says. "So many of them are just doing the wrong stuff. Let's start with the basics. People need water." He looks down into the well. "This is easy," he says. "I'll get an appraisal, and we'll price it out. Chief, thank you. You're the man." The captain looks at me and asks, "How do you say 'You're the man' in French?"

The Americans extend their humanitarian assistance to the troops they train as well. One night a Malian soldier comes by the Special Forces base, complaining of a toothache. A medic dressed in his after-hours T-shirt and running shorts emerges from the building and straps on a camping headlamp. He places the Malian soldier in a chair in the courtyard, gives him a shot of lidocaine, reaches into his mouth with a pair of curved dental pliers, and wrenches the infected tooth from his jaw. The Malian's toes curl in his sandals and his face twists in pain during the procedure—the infection counteracted the numbing effect of the drug, the medic says—but when it is all over he holds on to his tooth like a trophy and treats the medic like his new best friend. He smiles and waves a toy football one of the Americans gave him to squeeze during the extraction. "Merci!" he says several times, beaming as he goes out.

Special Forces soldiers are quick to highlight their forays into the humanitarian and development field, particularly as they relate to anti-terrorism efforts. It's all about winning the "hearts and minds" of the local population, the soldiers tell me. "People want to see progress," says William McRaven, the navy rear admiral. "Part of our credibility is to be able to come up to a well like that and say, 'You need that fixed? We're here to help.' And then 48 hours later, you give a local worker money to be distributed to the local population to fix their problem. There is nothing quite like being able to walk up and solve a problem quickly to get people's attention and get their support."

The captain in Timbuktu echoes McRaven's sentiment as we discuss the shooting-range and medical-assistance operations. "Both days were the war on terrorism," the captain says. "But the humanitarian-assistance part is more effective. It prevents terrorism just as much as training the Malian army. Because people are going to listen—nobody cares about what you know until they know you care."

But not everyone is convinced that having soldiers leading humanitarian missions is a good idea. "Mali is one of—I'll say 'unfortunately' in quotes—many places where the military is doing this kind of work," a high-ranking official at the United States Agency for International Development (usaid) tells me. "I say unfortunately not because they're not trying to do a good job, but because that's not what they've been trained to do. They don't know anything about development, but it's important for them to do it in order to win the hearts and minds of the local population.

"They're only now realizing," the official continues, "that there's more to development work than just handing out candy or rebuilding schools. And they're asking us to help them do a better job. The cost is that the military is going to do development better and they're effectively going to take our jobs. But the fact of the matter is, the military is huge. We don't have the human resources to take it all on. So we're trying to marry up our resources to reach a joint understanding of what the problems are in these regions. We have to use it as an asset."

Others believe the concerns are more complicated than a simple development-versus-military tug of war. "We have to be smart and nuanced and extremely aware of each country's political context as we proceed," says Michelle Gavin, a sub-Saharan-Africa expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former foreign-policy adviser for Senator Russ Feingold. "We don't want to find ourselves being duped into doing the bidding of foreign governments when their mission has nothing to do with counterterrorism. We have to proceed the way it was initially laid out, with military, diplomatic, and development elements—a cohesive package to make clear that we are there to help and can compete with these radical elements. Over the long term, we need that comprehensive approach. eucom's efforts are absolutely vital, but it can't be the sole ingredient to counterterror in that part of the world."

Another concern for many is that American troops might be repeating military mistakes of the past by training armed groups that will some day turn their weapons against U.S. interests, as in the case of the C.I.A.-funded-and-trained mujahideen in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s.

"You know, that's a risk you take whenever you train anyone. The option is inaction. And I don't think inaction is an option," Admiral McRaven tells me. "What if you train these guys and 10 years later it turns out they're bad people—isn't that a bad thing? Well, sure it's a bad thing. But so what do we do? We don't assume any risk and just decide that we're not going to train them? No, that's not an answer."

But sometimes—in a part of the world, say, where the local population is entirely Muslim and uncomfortable with U.S. military action elsewhere—an armed American presence might not be the answer either.

"Getting it wrong is much more dangerous than doing nothing," says Mike McGovern, an anthropologist at Yale who has traveled extensively in the Sahara region to study the threat of terrorism there. "Trying to do something good is not even close to being good enough. This is not about anyone's intentions. It has to do with strategic political action, symbolism, and perception. This is where the very best intentions can be totally misconstrued, and the end product can be just as bad as if the beginning intentions were nefarious."

If perception is everything, then maybe the U.S. Army's efforts still need work. Several local residents tell me that during a Special Forces operation in Timbuktu last year, many people in town were terrified one evening when the Americans fired off a couple flares from their base, lighting up the night sky. It turned out that some soldiers were just having fun, but the locals were not amused.

And what must the residents think when they watch U.S. Army convoys rumble through town looking ready for battle? Special Forces teams can treat all the sick patients they want, but what kind of impression are they leaving if, when they arrive to inoculate children, they are in armored Humvees with anti-tank missile launchers and .50-caliber machine guns on top?

"We give a lot of responsibility to young officers to make the right decisions. That doesn't always happen," says Admiral McRaven. "Maybe moving downtown with a .50-cal on the back of a Humvee is not the right thing to do. But I'd be willing to bet that many of the guys that did that are also sitting down eating with the locals, talking to the locals, and engendering more good will than ill will. You're going to find that the U.S. military as a whole is pretty well respected. Because, frankly, I think we're trying to do the right thing. And I think that is recognized by people. Even when we mess up."

After our time with the Special Forces team expires, the V.F. photographer and I spend a couple of days on our own in Timbuktu, hoping to get a sense of what the local residents think of the U.S. soldiers in their midst.

Mohamed Lamine Alwoidu sits on a prayer mat on the brick floor of his earthen house. It is late in the day, and dust-filled sunlight slants through the front door at a low angle. Alwoidu, who is the imam of Timbuktu's largest Wahhabi mosque, has a white turban wrapped loosely around his head. He strokes his gray beard as he speaks. Two of his granddaughters sit quietly behind him.

"For three years they've been telling us that American soldiers are based here," says Alwoidu, who is 70 and of Arab descent. "I still don't understand why they're here, so I'm suspicious. Some of my followers are very angry and are against the American presence, but as their leader I need to be neutral, so I try to reassure them."

Wahhabism is a conservative form of Islam that emerged from Saudi Arabia about 200 years ago. Because of its strict practices—followers believe in a literal interpretation of the Koran and frown on such activities as listening to modern music—it is often associated with Muslim extremists, although Wahhabi leaders have officially denounced terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda. In Timbuktu, Wahhabism appears to be on the rise, a fact that may be linked to the end of Mali's civil war against Tuareg rebels in 1996, which allowed religious figures studying in Saudi Arabia to return home.

"They haven't risen up against [the American presence] yet, but most of them are against it in their hearts," Alwoidu says of his disciples, who number about 300. "Development work would be of more use, and I don't think the American soldiers can do that as well as humanitarian workers. But I haven't seen what they're doing. I'd like to meet with the soldiers, if they want to come see me. But they haven't come."

One night in January 2006, two four-wheel-drive Toyotas arrived at Alwoidu's mosque carrying seven men, most of them in their 40s. Two were Palestinians, two were Algerians, and three were Pakistanis. They'd begun their drive in Morocco, headed south along the Atlantic coast to Mauritania, and then turned east into the thick of the Sahara.

"They were recruiters, and came looking for people to integrate into their radical way," says Baba Darfa, a member of the Wahhabi mosque. "When they arrived, they gathered us together and told us that their mission was to fight against the enemies of Islam—the Americans and the British. They told us, 'Your brothers are dying in Iraq. Americans are killing them because they are Muslim.'"

The men spent 11 days in Timbuktu, moving from mosque to mosque, spreading their message. They gave Darfa more than $3,000 to change at a local bank, an amount equal to more than six years of income for the average Malian citizen. "And that was only to get around town and buy food," Darfa says. "They were very rich—they handed money out to people after prayers. They were careful not to use the words 'al-Qaeda,' but they encouraged everyone to join the jihad against the United States."

Then one morning they were gone. "They disappeared in the middle of the night," says Darfa. "It wasn't until three days later that we realized they had taken two boys with them. They were the kids who had run errands for them the whole time they were here."

The boys were 11 and 14 years old, students in the Koranic school at the Wahhabi mosque. Their parents said nothing to authorities for fear of being labeled as extremists themselves, but one of the fathers believes the boys were sent to Pakistan under fake passports arranged by the recruiters, Darfa says.

Bilal Traore, a 27-year-old high-school teacher in Timbuktu who has nearly 400 students, has been watching boys disappear from his classrooms in recent years. "They tell people they're giving them scholarships to go to Mecca and to school in Saudi Arabia," he tells me as we watch a youth-league soccer game one evening at sunset. "But when they come back, they've changed their mentality entirely. Only 3 in 10 of my Arab students finish out the school year. They say their parents pull them out because the school is teaching a Western way of life. It's against their beliefs."

The day after meeting with the imam, Darfa takes us to visit the Wahhabi mosque, an ancient mud building with a short minaret in the Abaradjou neighborhood, near the northern edge of town. Darfa clears our visit with two elders before we take off our shoes and enter.

As a journalist in Africa I have interviewed rioters and rebel leaders. I've been robbed at gunpoint and threatened with machetes by drunken teenagers at burning roadblocks. I thought I'd developed a sixth sense for brewing trouble. But I am caught off guard by the quick shift in mood that occurs once we get inside the mosque.

The room is spacious, and the air is cool. Prayer mats lie on the floor, and the walls and pillars are painted blue and white. The back door is open, and I can see a few young children across the courtyard—students in the mosque's Koranic school. There is a microphone at the easternmost wall, with wires that lead up to speakers that are mounted on the minaret and used to announce the calls to prayer.

Suddenly, a man in a blue robe with a full, black beard storms in, glaring and pointing at us. He begins yelling and grabbing for our camera gear, intent on trashing it. Darfa and the elders restrain him as he shouts and shakes his fists. He is speaking in Arabic, but I clearly hear the words "al-Qaeda" and "bin Laden."

He chases us outside, where the tirade continues. The children from the Koranic school have filed out of class and into the street to watch. The bearded man picks up a large square rock, and all the students reach for stones. I look for our car, but our driver has left to get lunch. Then a man in a pickup truck offers us a ride. As we climb in, the bearded man says something to the children, the oldest of whom is about 10, and they start throwing their stones, which clank on the roof of the truck as we pull away.

When we get back to our hotel, I ask Darfa what the man was shouting. "He started off by saying that because white people had been allowed into the mosque the building would have to be washed," he says. "Then he said, 'We must kill them immediately. I hate white people! I don't want their money, I don't want to be near them, I don't want to smell them. Bin Laden was right! Only al-Qaeda knows how to deal with Americans—kill them!'"

We spend our last day in Mali in Bamako, the capital city, which lies about 400 miles southwest of Timbuktu, on the banks of the Niger River. We meet with Mohamed Kimbiri, the director of Radio Dambe (Radio Dignity), which has offices on a shaded street downtown. Kimbiri has a close relationship with the American embassy in Bamako and even went on an American-government-sponsored trip to the U.S. in 2004. He proudly shows off certificates that declare him an honorary citizen of the city of Lincoln and the state of Nebraska. None of this means, however, that he is a fan of U.S. foreign policy.

"War tactics have evolved. If the Americans are here to train us in these tactics, that's fine. If they're here for a crusade, that's a problem," Kimbiri tells me. "It's not American politics, it's Bush's politics, to be precise, that have made people anti-American. America has no more credibility. With Bush it's just power, power, power. His politics are not politics of justice or truth. They are politics of force and injustice and fear. And that is terrorism."

Not everyone sees it that way, though. Down the street from Kimbiri's office, on a walk through Bamako's main outdoor market, I strike up a conversation with a 42-year-old Tuareg from Gao, 200 miles east of Timbuktu. "I'm very happy with the American forces here," he says. "We want peace. And wherever there are American soldiers, there's always peace."

 
Austin Merrill's writing on Africa has appeared in The New Republic, Wired, The New York Observer, Tin House, and elsewhere.