Omar al-Bashir (1 January 1944-) was President of Sudan from 30 June 1989 to 11 April 2019, succeeding Ahmed al-Mirghani and preceding Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf. al-Bashir, of Arab ancestry, ordered a campaign of mass killing, rape, and pillage in Darfur against native Africans and carried out war crimes in both the Sudanese Civil War and Darfur War.
Biography[]
Omar al-Bashir was born on 1 January 1944 in Hosh Bannaga, Sudan to a Bedouin tribe, and he joined the Sudanese Army in 1960. He became a paratroop officer before serving with the Egyptian Army in the Yom Kippur War against Israel in 1973, and in 1981 he became the commander of an armored paratrooper brigade. In 1989, as a Brigadier, al-Bashir overthrew Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi when it began negotiations with separatist rebels in South Sudan, and al-Bashir ruled over the country during the Sudanese Civil War, in which the Muslim north fought against the Christian and animist south. In February 2003, the Darfur War broke out when the native Africans of the Darfur region decided to rise up against persecution that they faced from Arabs, and al-Bashir armed the Janjaweed militia to crush the rebels, massacring 300,000 people and displacing 3,000,000. He also embezzled $9,000,000,000 in government money for his own self. However, the International Criminal Court did not have enough evidence to imprison al-Bashir, whose dictatorship remained in power until 11 April 2019, when the military removed him from power and placed him under house arrest after a year of large-scale protests.