Mohammed Daoud Khan
Mohammed Daoud Khan was prime minister of Afghanistan from 1953 to 1963 and president from 1973 to 1978, the king's cousin and brother-in-law who deposed the king, ended the monarchy the family had held since 1929. He was killed with eighteen members of his family in the palace on 28 April 1978 by the communist officers he had used to take it. The premiership was the modernisation from above. There was the Soviet aid taken from 1955 after the Americans would not sell him arms. There were the Salang tunnel, the Bagram and Shindand airfields and the Kabul polytechnic built by the Russians, the Helmand valley by the Americans. The army's officers sent to Moscow to be trained, which was where the coup of 1978 was born. There was the unveiling of 1959, when he had his own wife and the ministers' appear at the independence parade without the chadri and faced down the mullahs of Kandahar. There was the Pashtunistan quarrel with Pakistan, which he made the state's cause. It closed the border in 1961 and cost him the office in March 1963 when the king had had enough. The ten years out were spent waiting. The coup of 17 July 1973, while the king was in Italy, was made with the Parcham communists and the Soviet-trained officers. The republic he proclaimed was his own. There were a single party, the constitution of 1977 that made him president for six years with every power, and a turn, in his last two years, away from Moscow and the Parchamis he had used, toward the Shah, the Saudis and Sadat, and toward the purge of the communists that he began in April 1978 with the arrest of Taraki and Karmal after the funeral of the Parchami Khyber, whom someone had murdered, had filled the streets. The officers struck the next day. The tanks reached the palace on the afternoon of 27 April, the air force bombed it. On the morning of the 28th he refused to surrender, fired on the officers who came for him. He was shot with his brother, his children and his grandchildren. They were buried in a mass grave that was found in 2008. He was born in Kabul, and educated in France. He was a general at thirty and Kandahar's governor. He was reburied with honours in March 2009 by the state that Karzai ran. It was the first the country had had since him that was not at war.
- Lived: 1909 CE – 1978 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: president, prime minister, general
