Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Abu Meniar el-Gaddafi was born in the North African desert, south of Sirte, Libya, in 1942 (the exact date is unknown; some sources day June 1, while others say sometime in September). The son of a poor Bedouin nomad, Gaddafi lived in his family's remote desert camp until he went away to school at age 9. While a student at a secondary school at Sebha, Gaddafi was inspired by the speeches of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and became a committed Arab nationalist. Gaddafi organized his fellow students into revolutionary study groups at Sebha; he continued the practice at the University of Libya in Tripoli, where he received a history degree in 1963. Following his graduation, Gaddafi entered the Libyan Military Academy in Benghazi, where he found many of the cadets were sympathetic to his anti-Western nationalism. Commissioned into the Libyan army in 1965, he began laying groundwork for an overthrow of the Libyan monarch, King Idris, whom he considered a pawn of the Wester