Mohammad Najibullah

Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai (6 August 1947 – 27 September 1996) was an Afghan military officer and politician who served as the fifth president of Afghanistan from 1987 until his resignation in April 1992, shortly after the Afghan mujahideen's takeover of Kabul. He was also the General Secretary of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) from 1986 to 1992. After a failed attempt to flee to India, Najibullah remained in Kabul, and lived in the United Nations headquarters until his assassination during the Taliban's first capture of Kabul in 1996.

A graduate of Kabul University, Najibullah held different careers under the PDPA. Following the Saur Revolution and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, Najibullah was a low-profile bureaucrat. He was sent into exile as Ambassador to Iran during Hafizullah Amin's rise to power. He returned to Afghanistan following the Soviet intervention which toppled Amin's rule and placed Babrak Karmal as head of the state, the party and the government. During Karmal's rule, Najibullah became head of the KHAD, the Afghan equivalent of the Soviet KGB. He was a member of the Parcham faction led by Karmal. During Najibullah's tenure as KHAD head, it became one of the most brutally efficient governmental organs. Because of this, he gained the attention of several leading Soviet officials, such as Yuri Andropov, Dmitriy Ustinov and Boris Ponomarev. In 1981, Najibullah was appointed to the PDPA Politburo. In 1985, Najibullah stepped down as the state security minister to focus on PDPA politics; he had been appointed to the PDPA Secretariat. Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, also the last Soviet leader, was able to get Karmal to step down as PDPA General Secretary in 1986, and replace him with Najibullah. For a number of months, Najibullah was locked in a power struggle against Karmal, who still retained his post of Chairman of the Revolutionary Council. Najibullah accused Karmal of trying to wreck his policy of National Reconciliation, a series of efforts by Najibullah to end the conflict.