Rift Appears Between Islamists and Main Rebel Group in Mali Video images published on Friday by Agence France-Presse provided a first look at events in Timbuktu, where Islamist rebels have asserted control and are seeking to impose Sharia law. "We are against independence," declared a man identified as the military chief of an Islamic group in Timbuktu earlier this week. We are against all rebellions not in the name of Islam. His speech emerged on Friday as part of video images from the vast, arid northern territory seized by rebels following a military coup that overthrew the government in the capital, Bamako, last month. The scenes - a ransacked police station, a burning building, armed men in pickup trucks and the black flag of the Islamist group Ansar ud-Din - show the ancient city of Timbuktu under the control of Islamic rebels seeking to impose a version of religious law. According to Le Monde, the video images were recorded on April 2 and 3. "We came to practice Islam in the name of Allah," the military leader of Ansar ud-Din, whose name was given as Omar Hamahae in a title on the video, said in French, calling for Islamic law to spread throughout Mali, not just in the north. For us, what we want, it's not Azawad. The statement was a further indication of an apparent gulf between the Islamists in Timbuktu and the main Tuareg rebel group, known as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, which declared an independent state in northern Mali on Friday. The two groups, who fought together to push out the Malian army last month, have appeared to diverge in their ideas for how to govern the seized territory. The main rebel group has presented itself as a secular separatist rebellion and sought legitimacy for their declaration of independence on Friday by referring to the charter of the United Nations and separatist ambitions dating to 1958, two years before Mali's independence from France, as my colleagues Lydia Polgreen and Alan Cowell report. "We, the people of Azawad," began the declaration, posted to the rebel group's Web site, "proclaim irrevocably the independent state of Azawad, starting from this day, Friday, April 6, 2012." Nevertheless, the proclamation appeared likely to further raise fears that a breakaway state could become a haven for Islamic militants, including an affiliate of Al Qaeda in the region. The military junta now leading Mali has stoked those fears, urging help from Western powers to turn back the rebels in the north and warning of a looming threat from the Islamic groups there if they do not, as The Lede observed. According to the Tuareg news site Toumast Press, the Islamists have already faced resistance from the local population in Timbuktu and an ultimatum from the main rebel group to disarm and leave the city. In an interview with the African news site Jeune Afrique, the representative for Timbuktu in Mali's Parliament, El Hadji Baba Haidara, lamented the takeover. "Why do they want to Islamize us?" he said, observing that the city has been Muslim since the 12th century. And now these Islamists want to teach us to pray! In fact, Timbuktu is a victim of its name and celebrity: for the rebels, it's a symbol that must be taken in order to be seen. I am not O.K. with Sharia in Timbuktu. For us, it's extremism. A British couple who owned a hotel in the city, once a draw for tourists, described their harrowing escape as the rebel forces moved in. "We got on to the road out of town when, rather suddenly, we drove into a gun battle," one of the owners, Neil Whitehead, told the BBC. He and his partner, Diane English, were later taken by "heavily armed men" more than 1,000 miles across the desert into neighboring Mauritania, an evacuation arranged through the French and British embassies, he said. Their hotel's Web site reflected their sanguine view of Timbuktu before the takeover: The hotel is surrounded by high walls with double gates, which are locked at night, and a member of staff is on hand at all hours. However, crime is not a particular issue in Timbuktu and the owners have always felt safe in the town and elsewhere in Mali. As separatist rebels attempted to redraw the map of Mali, placing Timbuktu in their breakaway state of Azawad, a debate percolated on Wikipedia during the last week over how to edit the entry on the region. "This article is about a part of Mali," one poster wrote on the discussion page for Azawad on Friday. We don't have the right to describe it as a sovereign state just because some armed men have declared it. "Not so," another responded. This is not the first instance in which Wikipedia has published a lengthy article on a nation or asserted national territory without an internationally recognized state. See also, Kurdistan, the articles on Uigurstan/Singkiang, Palestine. Other commentors added more examples, including Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of central Azerbaijan that Wikipedia describes as "a de facto independent but unrecognized state," and Somaliland, a self-declared republic in northern Somalia. The debate, which included whether to list the city of Gao as the capital of Azawad despite no capital being yet declared, reflected the uncertain situation in northern Mali. A rebel spokesman admitted in an interview with France 24 that there was some "confusion" on the ground between groups over who controlled what, and a Malian security official told Agence France-Presse that Ansar ud-Din, the Islamist group, was in charge and not the rebels who declared independence. "From what we know, the M.N.L.A. is in charge of nothing at the moment," the unnamed official said.