1. Four years ago in the Malian city of Timbuktu, @Baba_A_ and I crawled into the burned and bombed buildings that al-Qaeda had inhabited to retrieve 1000s of pages of documents. It was the birth of my beat and the start of a journey I am still on today. 
2. At the time, officials in Washington, who were still basking in the glow of having killed Osama bin Laden, insisted that the militants in Mali were not really al-Qaeda, but a gang of criminals and drug traffickers who had opportunistically appropriated the terror brand’s name
3. But the documents I found told a different story. They included letters from the general manager of al-Qaeda, then based in Yemen, which had been hand-carried across the desert in order to give the jihadists in Mali guidance on how to implement what they said was God’s law
4. They also included a lengthy disciplinary letter, accusing terror boss Moktar Belmoktar of acting like a prima donna. Among the charges against him: He had deigned to negotiate the ransom of 2 kidnapped Canadians on his own, without guidance from al-Qaeda leaders. That’s him:
5. In short, the records showed that the group’s tactics were being dictated by al-Qaeda’s central command. I saw just how off base officials were in their assessment of the terrorist group and how important it is to seek answers on the ground. Some of the documents I found:
6. Among the analysts who got it right from the start and challenged Washington’s skewed analysis were @thomasjoscelyn and @billroggio. For years, they lobbied the CIA to release the 100s of 1000s of files recovered in Osama bin Laden’s lair in Pakistan. They finally succeeded
7. Among the papers declassified this month from bin Laden’s hideout are numerous letters from al-Qaeda’s wing in Northern Africa, confirming in granular detail how closely the wing coordinated its activities with the mother brand.
8. In case you didn’t realize, all that was a trailer for this: Join me at @FDD in Washington tomorrow at 12:30 pm with @thomasjoscelyn @billroggio and the talented @KimDozier to see what else we learned from the declassified al-Qaeda papers.
9. And I’ve just learned that seats are almost gone at the @FDD venue for tomorrow. But you can join @thomasjoscelyn @billroggio @KimDozier and I remotely at this link: defenddemocracy.org/events/underst…
