Mohammad Najibullah
Mohammad Najibullah was president of Afghanistan from 1987 to April 1992, the last Communist, the physician who had run the secret police, the KHAD, for six years under the Soviet occupation, in which it grew to thirty thousand men and tortured and executed by the thousand, and whom Gorbachev chose in May 1986 to replace Babrak Karmal because he was the one who might survive the withdrawal. He renamed the party, dropped the socialism from the constitution, restored Islam as the state religion, and declared a national reconciliation with the mujahideen that nobody took up. He held Kabul for three years after the last Soviet soldier left in February 1989, which the CIA and Pakistan had said would be three months, with the Soviet money and weapons, three billion dollars a year, and the militias of Dostum and the others he paid. When the money stopped after the Soviet Union's end in December 1991 and Dostum changed sides in March 1992, the mujahideen took Kabul in April. He was stopped at the airport on his way to India. He took refuge in the UN compound, where he stayed for four and a half years, translating Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game into Pashto. He was born in Kabul in 1947 into a Ghilzai Pashtun family from Paktia, studied medicine at Kabul University, where he was a Parcham activist and was jailed twice. He was the party's ambassador to Tehran after the coup of 1978 and dismissed when the Khalq faction purged Parcham. He came back with the Soviet army in December 1979 to run the KHAD, where his size and his manner earned him the name Najib the Bull. The Taliban took Kabul on 26 September 1996, entered the UN compound, which the mujahideen governments had respected, and took him and his brother, castrated him, dragged him behind a truck and hanged them both from a traffic post outside the palace with cigarettes in their mouths and money stuffed in their pockets, which was the image the world saw of the new regime. The government he had led and the army of a hundred thousand that had held the cities were remembered afterwards, in the years the Taliban ruled and in the years the republic fell in eleven days, as the state that had lasted. A party of his name is registered in Kabul.
- Lived: 1947 CE – 1996 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: president, politician
