Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya

Taya was born at Atar, studied at a Franco-Arab school and then at a French military school, and fought in the Western Sahara War. ¹ He became Chief of Army Staff in July 1980 and prime minister in April 1981 under President Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla, and on 12 December 1984 he took power in a bloodless military coup. ¹

Taya held the premiership alongside the presidency until 1992. ¹ He pursued a strongly Arab nationalist line, established close co-operation with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and won the 2003 elections amid opposition allegations of fraud; on 28 October 1999 Mauritania joined Egypt, Palestine and Jordan as the fourth Arab League member to officially recognise Israel. ¹ The last years of his rule were marked by unrest in the military and hostility between the regime and the country's Islamists. ¹

While Taya was out of the country for the funeral of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, soldiers seized power on 3 August 2005. ¹ He left Niger for Banjul in the Gambia on 9 August and flew with his family to Qatar, arriving on 22 August 2005; the Arabic article likewise gives his residence as Doha. ^{1 2} In late 2013 he was appointed a teacher at the Ahmed Bin Mohammad Military School, a military academy in Qatar. ¹

No article text in any language consulted says anything about Taya's religion; Wikidata carries Sunni Islam as a single value, the articles file him under Mauritanian Sunni Muslims, and only the French infobox names Islam — the Arabic infobox's religion field is blank — so the museum records his faith as unknown and preserves the Sunni reading in the data file. ^{1 2 3 4}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.