Hafizullah Amin
Hafizullah Amin was president of Afghanistan for a hundred and four days, from 16 September 1979, when he had Taraki arrested, to 27 December 1979, when the KGB's Alpha group and the Spetsnaz stormed the Tajbeg palace and shot him. He was the man whose murder of his own leader convinced Moscow that the revolution had to be rescued from him, and the occasion of the invasion. He was the party's organiser, the Khalq faction's man in the army. He was a Kharoti Pashtun from Paghman who had studied at Columbia's teachers' college in New York, twice, run the Kabul teachers' training college and the Ibn-e-Sina school, recruited the officers who made the coup of April 1978, and given the order for it from the police station where he was held. He was Taraki's deputy prime minister and foreign minister, then prime minister from March 1979. He was the man who ran the terror, the land reform and the war against the villages while Taraki was the great leader on the posters. The quarrel with Taraki was Moscow's doing and his. The Soviets wanted him removed. Taraki came home from Moscow in September 1979 to do it, the shooting in the palace on 14 September killed Taraki's aides and not Amin. Amin took the party and the state two days later and had Taraki smothered on 8 October. He announced it as an illness. Brezhnev, who had embraced Taraki a month before, took as a personal affront. The hundred days were his attempt to be believed. There were a constitution promised, the prisoners' lists published, twelve thousand names, which he blamed on Taraki, the mosques visited, the approaches to Pakistan and to the Americans, which the KGB read as his going over. There were his requests, seven of them, for Soviet troops to hold Kabul while his army fought the rebels, which Moscow granted on 12 December for its own reasons. He moved to the Tajbeg palace outside the city on the Soviets' advice. He was poisoned at lunch on 27 December by a KGB cook. He was revived by Soviet doctors who had not been told. He was shot that evening in the palace corridors by the assault group that came for him, with his son and most of his guard. Karmal was announced as president from a radio transmitter in Soviet Uzbekistan before the shooting had stopped. He was born in Paghman. The Soviet account that he was a CIA agent is believed by nobody, including the Soviets who wrote it.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 1979 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: president, teacher, politician
