Idi Amin Army (UNLA). Amin's army retreated steadily, and, despite military help from Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Amin was forced to flee into exile by helicopter on 11 April 1979, when Kampala was captured. He escaped first to Libya, where he stayed until 1980, and ultimately settled in Saudi Arabia, where the Saudi royal family allowed him sanctuary and paid him a generous subsidy in return for staying out of politics. Amin lived for a number of years on the top two floors of the Novotel Hotel on Palestine Road in Jeddah. Brian Barron, who covered the Uganda–Tanzania war for the BBC as
Idi Amin school with only a fourth-grade English-language education, and did odd jobs before being recruited to the army by a British colonial army officer. Amin joined the King's African Rifles (KAR) of the British Colonial Army in 1946 as an assistant cook. In later life, he falsely claimed he was forced to join the armies during World War II and that he served in the Burma Campaign. He was transferred to Kenya for infantry service as a private in 1947, and served in the 21st KAR infantry battalion in Gilgil, Kenya until 1949. That year, his unit was deployed to northern