PARIS — An Islamic extremist pleaded guilty on Monday at theInternational Criminal Court to destroying shrines and damaging a mosque in the Malian city of Timbuktu, in the court’s first prosecution of the destruction of cultural heritage as a war crime.
Prosecutors have said that Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of a jihadist group linked to Al Qaeda, was present at the smashing of a number of venerable centuries-old mud and stone buildings holding the tombs of holy men and scholars whose worship was declared to be contrary to Islamic tenets.
Mr. Mahdi, a teacher who was born in or around 1975 near Timbuktu and who studied Islamic law in a Saudi-sponsored school in Libya, was also accused of leading a self-appointed police organization that meted out punishments like public floggings for minor infractions.
Although Mr. Mahdi is suspected of committing other crimes, legal experts said the case had been narrowly focused to highlight the growing awareness in international justice that cultural destruction is not only a war crime but also an intrinsic part of warfare aimed at destroying an opponent’s history and identity.
“The courts have been slow to recognize this, but there is a clear link between crimes committed against people and attacks on their cultural heritage,” said Andras Riedlmayer, a scholar of Islamic art and architecture at Harvard.
Mr. Mahdi’s guilty plea is likely to drastically change the course of what might have been a lengthy trial that would have involved bringing witnesses to The Hague from Timbuktu and other West African desert cities where jihadists held sway for almost a year.
Under court rules, there will be a few days of hearings to provide judges with more evidence to evaluate the scope of the case and to determine a sentence.
But even without a formal trial, the case, in which the hearings were broadcast by court video, was expected to attract wide interest.
The trial comes amid heightened international concern about the fate of many cultural and religious monuments in the Middle East and North Africa, where sites of early civilization have deteriorated or been razed in armed conflicts.
Numerous places of worship, archaeological remains, libraries, museums and other treasured sites have been destroyed by Islamist groups because they are seen to represent heretical values.
The Taliban were condemned internationally when militants blew up the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan in 2001. More recently, the Islamic State proudly distributed images showing its leveling of Nimrud and other pre-Islamic sites in Iraq, and it destroyed the temples of Palmyra in Syria.
No international court has jurisdiction over crimes in Iraq and Syria, nor over the continuing cultural devastation reported in Yemen.
“The ethnic cleansers in the Balkans, like the jihadis in Iraq, Syria and Timbuktu and other places, are keenly aware of the significance of this, which is why they devote so much personnel and resources to the destruction of religious and cultural landmarks,” Mr. Riedlmayer said.
The case has its roots in 2012, when armed rebels and homegrown Islamic jihadists allied with Al Qaeda established a breakaway ministate in the northern half of Mali that lasted about a year.
Western diplomats feared that the jihadists would set up an Islamic State-like territory in Timbuktu and elsewhere to serve as a base of operations that could draw in other foreign fighters from across the region.
At first, several hundred fighters, including men from Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Tunisia, moved into the region, where they recruited locals to help subdue the inhabitants as they imposed their harsh form of Islam. Mr. Mahdi, who was born in the region, was one of the local recruits.
Critics in Mali have described Mr. Mahdi as no more than a midlevel operative and have said that others in Timbuktu had greater power and responsibility.
Some jihadists fled after French troops drove them out in 2013, and others appeared to have received amnesty after peace talks. Mr. Mahdi was the only one to end up in court in The Hague.
He was arrested in Niger by French troops when they intercepted a jihadist convoy smuggling weapons from Libya. After being held in Niger for a year, he was sent to The Hague.
In and around Timbuktu, most of the destroyed tombs have been rebuilt in the traditional masonry with funds from foreign donors.
Tensions are still high in the once-thriving trading town often visited by pilgrims and tourists. Jihadists and bandits roam the area, and not all of those who fled have returned — notably women, who were particular targets.
Alice Banens, a lawyer for the International Federation for Human Rights, said lawsuits had been filed in Mali on behalf of women and girls who had been raped. She said that numerous women had been forced to marry jihadists, and that others were captured and used as sexual slaves by the foreign fighters.
They have also asked the court to expand the charges against Mr. Mahdi, arguing that his morality brigade was an accomplice to the abuse, she said.
There are some precedents in modern international law for giving cultural destruction a more central place among war crimes.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has handed down convictions for the shelling of architectural jewels in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik and the Bosnian city of Mostar. The court found that the attacks were not justified for military reasons, but that they had been intended to break the people’s morale.
In Bosnia, where Serbia waged a three-year campaign to drive Muslims from their homes in the 1990s, close to 1,200 mosques were damaged or destroyed to discourage Bosnian Muslims from returning, researchers at the court found. Catholic and Orthodox churches were also destroyed in the Bosnian conflict, but far fewer of them.
In Mali, where 16 tombs were destroyed and some ancient mosques disfigured, the numbers may seem relatively small.
But Stephen J. Rapp, a former prosecutor and former ambassador at large to tribunals handling cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, said, “the Mali case is useful because it could help persuade other nations to pursue similar charges relating to Syria and Iraq, where no international court has yet jurisdiction.”
In an interview, Mr. Rapp said that Mr. Mahdi’s case was noteworthy “because this is not about a foot soldier killing or smashing things, but about an ideologue, someone who was given authority and who gave legal advice to the local Islamic court.”
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