It was midnight and Abdoulaye Dicko was asleep at home when his door was suddenly forced open and five men burst in. They shot him four times before vanishing into the night.
Until recently the gunmen had been masters of Boni, a small town in northern Mali, administering lashings to women who ventured outside without a veil and to youths caught smoking. When French troops drove past on their way to Gao, the rebels disappeared. But, it seems, they didn't go far.
After a successful three-week operation, French troops are close to recapturing all the key northern towns previously held by the rebels. They took Timbuktu and Gao over the weekend. Early on Wednesday, they secured the airport in the desert town of Kidal, meeting no resistance, but were prevented from entering the town itself because of a sandstorm, said the French defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian.
A crucial question remains, however. Where did the rebels go?
Instead of battling the French, Mali's former colonial rulers, the Islamist fighters escaped to fight another day. Many Malians fear it is only a matter of time before they come back.
"The rebels didn't ever leave. They are still living in caves or in the forest, not far from Boni," Dicko said.
"When the French army drove past we all cheered and waved, shouting: 'Vive la France.' But the French didn't stop. And then a few days later, on Monday night, five of them came back and shot me. They also shot my wife and my daughter."
Dicko said he was singled out for reprisals because he is the son of Boni's mayor, Hamadoun Dicko, and knew who had sided with the insurgents.
The trouble had begun, he said, after Mali's president was toppled in a coup last March. Soon afterwards the north of the country rapidly fell under rebel control and the secular MNLA, fighting for an independent Tuareg state, seized the nearby town of Douentza.
On 1 September, however, the radical Islamist Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), an offshoot of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), took over. It immediately imposed sharia law. According to Dicko, the rebels in his neighbourhood were never pious believers — more a gang of local bandits and criminal opportunists.
Many believe that the MNLA and MUJAO are in effect indistinguishable, with one group blending into the other, depending on which is the more powerful. "They are all the same," Dicko said, speaking from the Niger river town of Mopti, where he is recovering in hospital.
Hassane Cissé, Douentza's mayor, said the MNLA had handed his town over to the jihadists after a friendly discussion. The rebels had looted the town, making off with the doors and air-conditioners from his administrative HQ. Regrettably, he said, the Malian army had run away. They were never more than about 50 fighters, he said, and sometimes as few as five, and they were able to capture Douentza with just five or six armed pick-ups.
During their brief period in charge, the Islamists ripped down all the Malian flags. On one occasion, they administered five lashes to a group of youths caught drinking in the public square.
Most of the fighters were outsiders, he suggested – Algerians, Mauritanians, Qataris – with a couple of locals.
"They wanted to impose sharia law in the whole of west Africa," he said, admitting that he had sat out their rule in the capital, Bamako. "They have a vision of radical Islam. They wanted to start with Mali, then spread this vision to other countries. They would beat any woman who didn't wear a veil."
The mayor was sanguine about the likelihood of the rebels regrouping, and suggested they may have fled to neighbouring countries, now a force for regional instability. Aid agencies working in nearby Burkina Faso have stepped up security following reports of rebel fighters marauding south of Douentza, close to the border.
France is hoping that a UN-backed African intervention force, now expected to exceed 8,000 troops, can be fully deployed in Mali to bolster security and perhaps even hunt down the Islamist radicals. On Wednesday new recruits to the Mali army, wearing green "Liberation Force of the North" T-shirts, were exercising in a dusty square not far from the French garrison at Sévaré airport. Most did not have weapons. But with France winding up the first successful phase of its military mission, it remains to be seen how effective the Mali army will be.
Downing Street confirmed on Tuesday Britain will send 250 soldiers to the region to train the African force. Over the past decade the United States has invested much effort in bolstering Mali's army, only to see it crumble when the Islamists attacked.
France's foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, signalled on Wednesday that his military would not remain in Mali for ever. "Liberating Gao and Timbuktu very quickly was part of the plan. Now it's up to the African countries to take over," he said.
Fabius conceded the country was still far from secure, with the insurgents still able to retreat to hideouts in the desert, especially in their traditional homeland in the mountains north of Kidal. "We have to be careful. We are entering a complicated phase where the risks of attacks or kidnappings are extremely high. French interests are threatened throughout the entire Sahel."
French foreign ministry officials also urged the Malian government to begin a political dialogue with legitimate civilian groups in the north that recognised Mali's territorial integrity. They said only "north-south" dialogue would allow the Malian state back into the north of the country, the scene of numerous violent on-off rebellions.
Dicko's wife and 20-year-old daughter, meanwhile, both survived the attack and are also recovering in hospital. His daughter got a bullet in the shoulder. Dicko said he recognised the men who had shot him, and had managed to bargain with them previously to sort out local disputes. On one occasion, he said, two teenage rebels who were shepherds had got into a fight, with one shooting and killing the other. He had persuaded the rebels not to take the surviving teenager to Gao, where a brutal sharia court had been set up to try offences.
An aide to Douentza's mayor, Seydou Kone, said the rebels had lured many young men into their ranks by promising large sums of money.
Typically, he said, rebel leaders paid a small sum up front, around 15,000 Central African francs (£20), but then failed to deliver a promised monthly wage of 450,000 CFA.
What did he think would happen now? Would the rebels quit? He replied: "No. The rebels have hidden themselves. They can attack just like that."