Khartoum — Omar Hassan al-Bashir survived multiple armed rebellions, economic crises and attempts by the West to make him a pariah before he was finally ousted as Sudan's president by the military on Thursday following protests against his 30-year rule.
Since taking office in what was then Africa's largest country, he fought a protracted civil war with southern rebels, which ended with the secession of South Sudan in 2011 and the loss of more than 70% of Sudan's oil.
Sudan has suffered prolonged periods of isolation since 1993, when the US added Bashir's government to its list of terrorism sponsors for harbouring Islamist militants. Washington followed up with sanctions four years later. The protests in Sudan followed the success of similar but much bigger demonstrations in Algeria in forcing long-ruling Abdelaziz Bouteflika to exit.
Bashir was born on January 1 1944 to a poor farming family in Hosh Bannaga, a small village consisting mainly of mud houses and dusty streets on the eastern bank of the Nile River, some 150km north of the capital, Khartoum.
The head of the junta that seized power in 1989, Bashir dissolved the military council in 1993 and ruled with an iron fist. But it was Bashir's response to the insurgency in the western Darfur region that has come to define his legacy.
Facing an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant over the death of an estimated 300,000 people in Darfur, Bashir held on to power as a shield against a trial similar to that of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
Defying the ICC, Bashir continued to visit friendly foreign states as he tried to show he had not been cowed by the international arrest warrant. He has sought to play on regional and international differences to improve Sudan's standing. In 2013, he hosted then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Khartoum.
Bashir courted Turkey and Russia, at the same time as Khartoum stepped up security co-operation with Washington, hoping to speed up the country's emergence from decades of US sanctions that were lifted in 2017.