Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president deposed by his own military this week after mass protests against his 30-year dictatorship, played a central role in some of the worst atrocities of the past century and left a legacy of human suffering.

Al-Bashir carried out a decadeslong civil conflict rife with human rights abuses, oversaw a war in the country’s Darfur region that killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions of others, and gave haven to some of the world’s most violent Islamist extremists, including Osama bin Laden.

Not only did al-Bashir devastate Sudan, but he brought a wider destabilization to countries around it and even further afield both through refugee crises and supporting disastrous military campaigns. Sudan has in recent years sent thousands of militia troops, many of them child soldiers, to fight in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Al-Bashir came to power in 1989 after a bloodless military coup, and the country spent years after as a hub for Islamist extremist groups who found protection and a friendly government. Along with ally Hassan al-Turabi, he provided a safe space in the early 1990s for extremist ideologues to promote their views and let bin Laden live in the country and build up al Qaeda’s capabilities for five years. The U.S. designated the country a state-sponsor of terrorism in 1993.

Meanwhile, al-Bashir also waged a protracted civil war against rebel groups in southern Sudan in which government troops bombed villages and carried out numerous atrocities. The country’s valuable southern oil fields became the site of scorched earth tactics that included the burning of villages and massive displacement of civilians, according to Jehanne Henry, associate director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa division.

In the western Darfur region of Sudan, al-Bashir oversaw a government-backed militia campaign against non-Arab tribes that killed between 200,000 and 400,000 people and displaced millions more. The Janjaweed militia committed war crimes that included forced displacement and the use of rape as a weapon of war, while al-Bashir’s government forces aided them with heavy aerial bombing campaigns that killed civilians. The United States described the conflict as a genocide.