Ibrahim Ag Alhabib

Ibrahim Ag Alhabib (born 1960) is a Tuareg musician and the founder of the Saharan music group Tinariwen. While in exile, Ibrahim met other Tuareg youths with similar stories and experiences and when Libya's Muammar Gaddafi called for Tuareg rebels to join military training camps, he along with others joined the army. In 1990, after the fall of Gaddafi, Ag Alhabib was among those Tuaregs who returned to northern Mali and Niger.

Ag Alhabib was born in Tessalit in the mountainous region of Mali in 1960 but left for Algeria with his grandmother at the age of four (a Tuareg rebel) after witnessing the execution of his father by the State army during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child, Ag Ahabib saw a western film (The Fastest Guitar Alive) in which a cowboy (played by Roy Orbison) played a guitar with a gun. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes. Ag Alhabib first lived in Algeria in refugee camps near Bordj Badji Mokhtar and in the deserts around the southern city of Tamanrasset, where he received a guitar from a local Arab man. Later, he resided with other Tuareg exiles in Libya and Algeria.

In the late 1970s, Ag Alhabib joined with other musicians in the Tuareg rebel community, exploring the radical chaabi protest music of Moroccan groups like Nass El Ghiwane and Jil Jilala; Algerian pop rai; and western rock and pop artists like Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits, Jimi Hendrix, Boney M, and Bob Marley. Ag Alhabib formed a group with Alhassane Ag Touhami and brothers Inteyeden Ag Ablil and Liya Ag Ablil in Tamanrasset, Algeria to play at parties and weddings. Ag Alhabib acquired his first real acoustic guitar in 1979. While the group had no official name, people began to call them Kel Tinariwen, which in the Tamashek language translates as "The People of the Deserts" or "The Desert Boys."

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