Diabaly, population 35,000, has only one of everything — one pharmacy, one road, one secondary school.

Kone and his neighbors were woken up at 3 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 14, by the sound of gunfire. By breakfast time, the column of fighters entered the town, and the government soldiers stationed here were seen fleeing on foot. The combatants wore bulletproof vests over an unfamiliar style of tunic that stopped at their knees, meant to evoke that worn by the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century.

They handed out candy to the children and took down the Malian flag flapping above the school. Then they scouted out houses.

“It was Monday at around 7:30 a.m. that they came into my house. They gave out bonbons and gifts to the children, and told us not to be afraid,” said Hamidou Sissouma, a schoolteacher, pulling out a short, gray-colored string of prayer beads they had given him. “Then they made themselves tea. They used my bucket to wash themselves. … I was afraid, so I left and went to stay with friends.”

Within hours, French jets arrived and bombed five rebel vehicles parked in the open, leaving only their charred shells. By Tuesday, the Islamists were looking for cover for their fleet of about 30 to 40 all-terrain vehicles.

When Sissouma returned to his house, he found they had rammed a pickup truck into the wall of his compound, punching a hole large enough to drive two 4-by-4′s into his courtyard. They promised to reimburse him for the damage.

The men at Sissouma’s house reported to a light-skinned Arabic-speaking man, whose unit also took over the home of a neighbor, Mohamed Sanogo. Both houses seem to have been chosen for their bountiful mango trees. The men parked their cars so close to a tree in Sanogo’s yard that they shaved off a lower branch, Sanogo said, showing the scarred, freshly-cut stump. They collected dirt, added water and painted their vehicles with mud, further camouflaging them.

When Kone came over to Sanogo’s house on Wednesday, he stumbled upon the uninvited houseguests. He immediately turned to leave. The short, light-skinned man who appeared to be their leader waved him in, telling him not to be afraid. “Do you know who I am?” the man asked. His white beard pointed out from his chin in a scruffy goatee, and he spoke only a smattering of French, using Arabic with his guards.

When Kone said no, the commander told him to go watch the evening news. Then, changing his mind, he declared: “I am Abou Zeid.”

Roughly a dozen other residents confirmed that the man occupying the house had identified himself as Abou Zeid. Their description matches the few photographs that exist of a man described by the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations as “the most violent and radical” of the leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

Born in southern Algeria, the 50-something jihadist has operated in Mali since at least 2003, and is behind dozens of kidnappings of European aid workers and tourists, each of whom earned him an estimated $2 to $3 million, according to Stratfor, an intelligence gathering unit. Known for his deep-seated hatred of the West, he has executed several hostages and is the subject of United Nations sanctions due to his association with al-Qaida.

In Diabaly, he exuded authority, residents say, and fighters approached him with deference, speaking in a lowered voice, almost a whisper, as if addressing a priest. He spent the daylight hours sitting on a mat in the shade reading the Quran. At all times, he was flanked by at a minimum five guards, and at least one stood sentinel at night when he slept.

The rebels were traveling with boxes of food imported from Algeria, Abou Zeid’s birthplace. He left behind several discarded macaroni packets made by a brand headquartered in Algeria, according to the label, along with packages of Algerian powdered milk on the floor of the room where he slept.

Although Diabaly residents were terrified by the fighters, and many came out to cheer the French, they said the Islamists had gone to lengths to show respect.

When fighters entered the compound next to Sidi Toure’s, they addressed Toure over the shared wall between the two homes. His neighbors had fled.

“They explained that they wanted to take over my neighbor’s house, and said they were willing to pay rent,” he said. “Even for the water that they took from our well, they offered to pay.”

Toure said he told them he did not need their money and would rather they leave. They said they would not stay long.

The room they used to stock their arms is now empty, except for a few cardboard boxes and a former ammunition crate. What they forgot to take was a notebook, where they started writing in the ledger from the back page to the front, as is customary in Arabic.

The first page of writing begins with an inventory of weapons: “One 60 mm mortar, One Toshka machine gun, Three machine guns, Four Dabekterbov machine guns without a magazine, One armored Bika, 16 Chinese Kalashnikov rifles without magazines, 21 Sardinia 23, 26 RPG shells …” in a list that reads like the ingredients for a Soviet-era war.

As the French air strikes intensified, the fighters blended in more and more with the population, said witnesses. They no longer drove their cars, borrowing scooters from locals, and timed their movements to match those of civilians.

“When the population is outside, they are outside,” said Kone. “When the population is indoors, they are indoors.”

Where they managed to bomb, the French did so with remarkable precision. They took out five cars parked just yards from the home of Adama Nantoume without harming his family or damaging his home.

“The explosions were so loud that for a while I thought I had gone deaf,” Nantoume said. “I was suffocated by the smoke. And the light burned my eyes. The gas made me cry. … But I was not hurt.”

As Diabaly began to empty out, the Islamists set up roadblocks to prevent civilians from leaving, according to locals whose families and friends were turned back. Many made it out anyway, cutting across unpatrolled rice fields.

Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the Islamists left on Thursday. It’s not clear if they went because of the damage done by the sustained air raids, or in the face of a pending land assault. Residents said their departing cars looked like moving bushes because they had so much foliage attached to them.

It was another four days before the French declared the area safe to enter.

As of Monday, life in Diabaly appeared to have gone back to normal. Women gave their children bucket baths and washed their pots and pans in the irrigation canal running along one side of the town. The families whose properties had been occupied by the Islamists were cleaning up the trash they left behind.

One of the few things the Islamists stole, residents said, was a Canal+ cable television decoder. They wanted access to French channels to learn what the French were saying about the battle they had just fought.

___

Associated Press writers Baba Ahmed in Diabaly, Mali and Jamey Keaten in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.