Muammar Gaddafi was once bigger than life. But at the end of his time in power, his braggadocio had become surreal, his threats disembodied; he was almost all feint and desperate manipulation. "It's time to leave frizz head" read one sign in Tripoli, the capital once both enthralled and scared to death of him, as his control over the city crumbled in August. Pay no attention to the man wearing the curtain.
Two months before his actual demise, his menace was already in retreat. In the late afternoon of Tuesday, Aug. 23, after hours of pounding battle, Libya's rebels smashed through the fortified perimeter of Gaddafi's compound in western Tripoli ? the nerve center of the old regime ? sending huge plumes of black smoke rising over the city. Gaddafi and his loyalists fled. He declared the withdrawal "tactical" but he was now running for his life. The triumphant transitional government, now no longer rebels but rulers, offered more than $1 million for his head. They got it on Oct. 20 when a bloodied Gaddafi was captured as his hometown of Sirt fell to the new government after a ferocious siege of several weeks. He was very quickly reported to have died of his wounds, a gruesome cellphone photo of a pale faced man looking much like the Colonel circulated online almost immediately. His last words may have been "Don't shoot." Gaddafi's long, weird run as unquestioned overlord of Libya was over. (See pictures of Gaddafi's 40 years in power.)
Long before his end, Muammar Gaddafi had become the weird, creepy, certainly criminal uncle who showed up, because he was really rich, at reunions of world leaders. He did not begin that way. How a young man from deep poverty in a rural North African town rose to become one of the West's most intractable foes, and then one of its most critical political and economic partners, is an extraordinary political saga.
Gaddafi was scarcely destined for power. Born in 1942 into a tribal Bedouin family near the coastal town of Sirt, he was raised in a country still digging out from the ravages of World War II and a long struggle against Italian colonialism. The giant oil reserves which lay beneath the Libyan desert were years away from being explored. In fact, Libya was barely a nation at all. Gaddafi was nine years old when the country finally gained its independence from France and Britain (which administered it jointly after the war's end) and became a monarchy under King Idris al-Sanusi. (Watch TIME's 2009 interview with Muammar Gaddafi.)
Like many provincial boys with little education, Gaddafi joined the army. He became a captain, then trained at Britain's elite Sandhurst Academy, before returning home as an officer in the Signal Corps. It was in that position, at just 27, that he led a group of junior officers in a bloodless coup, toppling King Idris and declaring himself Colonel. In the museum glorifying Gaddafi's "people's revolution," set within the high stone walls of the fortress in Tripoli's Green Square, one of the main exhibits was a battered, sand-colored Jeep with open sides, in which Gaddafi, according to his own legend, rode into the city, victorious on Sept. 1, 1969, to present himself as Libya's leader to a people hungry for popular leadership.
For many Libyans, it was a thrilling moment. Back in 1968, Gaddafi, a dashing young man with a chiseled jaw and piercing eyes, looked to many Libyans every bit as romantic a figure as Che Guevara. "We thought it was a revolution for freedom and human rights," says Fathi Baja, 58, a political science professor in Benghazi. Like countless young Libyans in 1969, Baja, who was at high school at the time, marched in the streets, hailing Gaddafi for overthrowing King Idris. Much later, Baja would become the opposition's head of political affairs when the rebellion against Gaddafi erupted in February 2011. By then, the vehicle of legend had become not Gaddafi's jeep but the ramshackle pick-ups that the rebel fighters rode to the front to battle his fearsome army. (See pictures of the fight for Gaddafi's hometown.)
See TIME's special report "The Middle East in Revolt."
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Libyans would grow to rue the day Gaddafi took over. He declared a "people's revolution" and officially changing the country's name to the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah ? the last word meaning "state of the masses" ? a bloated designation that was as meaningless at the end as Gaddafi's title of "Brother Leader."
Gaddafi's Libya was a parallel universe to the one the rest of humanity lived in. He laid out his plan for Libya in his 82-page Green Book, a quirky, often banal set of declarations which remained Libya's political Bible for nearly four decades. Quotes from the Green Book were plastered across bridges, walls, schools and post offices across Libya. All children were required to learn the Green Book. Children could recite passages by heart.
In theory, according to Gaddafi, Libyans controlled their country through consensus decisions made in public meetings held every few months, as though Libya could be managed much like a rural village. In reality, Gaddafi ensured political disarray and paralysis, in which only one person's opinion counted in all decisions: his. Any challenge invited harsh punishment. Thousands died in Gaddafi's jails, and hundreds of thousands of Libyans fled into exile for fear of being ensnared by his ever-watchful security forces.
Outside of Libya, Gaddafi will be remembered for his enmities. To Europeans and Americans in particular, Gaddafi's legacy will be indelibly marked by bloodshed and violence. The Libyan leader's foreign ambitions began in earnest after Libya became a major oil producer during the 1970s and 1980s, bringing billions of dollars of oil revenues into the country, and turning Gaddafi into a major financial benefactor in the region. He chose to spend some of his wealth on terrorist organizations, like the Palestinian Abu Nidal group, which, financed by Libya, carried out the 1986 bombing of the La Belle Discotheque in West Berlin, which killed two American servicemen. In retaliation, President Ronald Reagan sent planes to bomb installations in Benghazi, as well as Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, where they obliterated a two-story residence and killed Gaddafi's adopted daughter. Gaddafi memorialized the attack as a sign of the West's enmity toward him. A master of image-making, Gaddafi left the Reagan-era wreckage intact for a quarter-century, with a gold-painted statue in front of the smashed house, showing a raised fist around a crumpled F-16 bomber on which was painted "USA." The statue was just a short but provocative walk away from where Gaddafi hosted Western leaders in his tent over several years.
In December 1988, two years after the U.S. bombing, Libya struck back with its most devastating attack. A Pan Am passenger jet exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. In 1992, the United Nations imposed economic sanctions against Libya, forcing out U.S. oil companies, which ran much of the country's huge energy operations. Gaddafi was not deterred, however. With European oil companies still operating, and his oil wealth continuing to grow, he financed other terror groups. Having been rebuffed by many of his Arab neighbors as an eccentric menace, Gaddafi cast himself instead as an African leader, backing regimes that conducted savage campaigns of violence in West Africa. But one global event in which Gaddafi had no role ? the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.--drastically changed the Libyan leader's policies. Fearing that he might be the next target of attack, after the West's invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, Gaddafi abandoned his pursuit of nuclear weapons in 2003. In painstaking deals cut behind closed doors, Libyan and CIA officials began sharing intelligence about al-Qaeda, which Gaddafi had long loathed. Indeed, Gaddafi was the first head of state, in 1998, to ever request an Interpol arrest warrant against Osama Bin Laden.
When the U.S. lifted sanctions in 2005, American oil companies rushed back to Tripoli. So too did other Western companies, scrambling to reenter one of Africa's biggest oil producers. Within a few years, sprawling InterContinental and Marriott Hotels had opened along Tripoli's Mediterranean sea front, and tall office towers sprung up to house the onrush of new business.
Gaddafi's willingness to change was extremely limited, both in terms of style and political substance ? even as his eccentricities became self-parody. To the end, during Gaddafi's meetings with Western leaders, when they sat on a traditional divan in his Bedouin tent, he hectored them about historical wrongs against Libya. He insisted on traveling with his tent, too, including to Paris during a frigid winter, and he attempted and failed to set a tent up in the New York area, when he went to address the United Nations in 2009. On that occasion, he harangued the West for more than 90 minutes, attacking its moral bankruptcy in an often nonsensical rant.
It can be argued Gaddafi has done some good. At least in some small measure due to his efforts, the country now has modern highways, several cities, high literacy and relative prosperity for many Libyans. Yet despite the veneer of success, for most Libyans the Gaddafi years have an acrid taste. Their memories will likely be of a cloistered regime whose privilege and wealth were increasingly reserved for a small circle of Gaddafi loyalists and relatives. They will also remember the ghastly brutality.
When activists staged a limited rebellion in Benghazi in 1996, security forces retaliated by killing about 1,200 inmates ? many of them from Benghazi ? in the notorious Abu Salim prison. It was that attack which finally sowed the seeds for Gaddafi's demise. The relatives of those killed in 1996 formed a protest group, one part of which rejected Gaddafi's offers of compensation. It was the core group of those relatives who initially staged the fateful demonstration outside Benghazi's courthouse on Feb. 15, 2011, that sparked the revolt, and ultimately brought down Gaddafi after nearly 42 years in power.
In the end, no one could save Gaddafi ? not the mercenaries he had hired from Chad and Mali; not the Western politicians nor the Western oil companies; and not Gaddafi's seven sons whose bitter rivalries he had helped to feed over the years as they maneuvered for the dynastic succession. After the uprising began last February, and long before the NATO bombing began last March, Gaddafi climbed atop the stone wall of the fortress in Green Square. There, he told a few hundred supporters that he would "die here on the dear soil of Libya." Not for him an ignominious exile, or surrender to a war-crimes trial in The Hague. Instead, he vowed to die like a soldier, as a martyr in battle. He is now, it appears, dead. But he will not be remembered as a martyr. That honor is reserved for the countless lives he took and the many who died fighting to bring him down.
See TIME's special report "The Middle East in Revolt."
See the world's most influential people in the 2011 TIME 100.
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