Omar al-Bashir

Omar al-Bashir has two wives. His first wife is his cousin, Fatima Khalid while his second wife is a woman named Widad Babiker Omer. Omer was once married to Ibrahim Shamsaddin, a member of the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation, with whom she has several children. Omar al-Bashir does not have any children of his own with either of his wives.

Omar al-Bashir was born on 1 January 1944 in Hosh Bannaga, north of the capital, Khartoum, Sudan. He is of Arab descent, belonging to Al-Bedairyya Al-Dahmashyya, a Bedouin tribe. His father was a farmer.

His family moved to Khartoum when he was a young boy and he competed his schooling there.

He studied at the Egyptian Military Academy in Cairo and then at the Sudan Military Academy in Khartoum from where he graduated in 1966.

Omar al-Bashir joined the army as a young man and rose through the ranks swiftly. He became a paratrooper and fought in the Egyptian army in the Arab-Israeli war in October 1973.

He went to the United Arab Emirates as the Sudanese military attaché in 1975, and upon his return he was made a garrison commander. He became the commander of an armored parachute brigade in 1981.

Omar al-Bashir assumed the leading role in the Sudanese army’s campaign against the rebels of the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the mid-1980s.

By the late 1980s he had risen to the rank of a brigadier in the Sudanese army. At that time, the country was at the risk of entering a famine, and he was increasingly getting dissatisfied with the administration of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi.

He led a group of army officers in a bloodless military coup on 30 June 1989 to oust the unstable coalition government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, and took over the leadership of the country.