Nur Muhammad Taraki

Nur Muhammad Taraki (Pashto: نور محمد ترکی‎; 14 July 1917 – 9 October 1979) was an Afghan communist politician, revolutionary, journalist and writer. He was a founding member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) who served as its General Secretary from 1965 to 1979 and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council from 1978 to 1979.

Taraki was born in Nawa, Ghazni Province. He received his primary and secondary education in Pishin district in Balochistan and graduated from Kabul University, after which he started his political career as a journalist. From the 1940s onward Taraki also wrote novels and short stories in the socialist realism style. Forming the PDPA at his residence in Kabul along with Babrak Karmal, he was elected as the party's General Secretary at its first congress. He ran as a candidate in the 1965 Afghan parliamentary election but failed to win a seat. In 1966 he published the Khalq, a party newspaper advocating for class struggle, but the government closed it down shortly afterward. In 1978 he, Hafizullah Amin and Babrak Karmal initiated the Saur Revolution and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Taraki's leadership was short-lived and marked by controversies. The government was divided between two PDPA factions: the Khalqists (led by Taraki), the majority, and the Parchamites. Taraki along with his "protégé" Amin started a purge of the government and party that led to several high-ranking Parchamite members being sent into de facto exile by being assigned to serve overseas as ambassadors, and later started jailing domestic Parchamites. His regime locked up dissidents and oversaw massacres of villagers, citing the necessity of Red Terror by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, that opponents of the Saur Revolution had to be eliminated. These factors, among others, triggered a popular backlash that led to a full-blown rebellion. Despite repeated attempts, Taraki was unable to persuade the Soviet Union to intervene in support of the restoration of civil order. Amin initiated most of these policies behind the scenes.