Afghanistan :: American America History

Afghanistan The King was overthrown in 1973. Muhammad Daoud took the power as President of the Afghanistan. He established an autocratic, one-party state, later had purged his government of leftists, and in the last years of his rule had sought financial support form Iran, ruled by the Shah, and Saudi Arabia in order to make Afghanistan less dependent on Soviet economic aid. On April 28, 1978, the regime of President Mohammad Daoud ended violently. Military units raided the Presidential Palace, in Kabul. Killed the president and most members of his family. All happened after the assassination of Mir Akbar Khyber, April 17, a Marxist ideologue a member of the Parcham faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. (PDPA) was a Marxist-oriented party. On April 19 the party organized a mass rally and march in the honor of Khyber's funeral. Marched through the streets of Kabul and shouted anti-American slogans in front of the United States embassy. President Daoud ordered the arrest of seven top PDPA leaders. The PDPA Central committee member Hafizullah Amin was placed under house arrest shortly. He planed a coup d'etat. PDPA leaders were liberated from a government prison. The plan for the April coup, according to Amin in a press conference that it had occurred two years ahead of the PDPA's schedule for revolution. Taraki, Amin, and Karmal were the central player in the leftists' revolution of the Afghanistan. Taraki was born in 1917, was the oldest. His father was a livestock dealer and small-time smuggler. His family's described by Dupree in Nyrop (pg. 218) as semi nomadic, traveling frequently between Ghazini Province and British India. He attended a provincial elementary school and a middle school in Qandahar and was. He began to write short stories. In 1940s his stories refluxing the living condition of Afghan peasants, which approved by Soviet critics as Scientific Socialist themes. Amin was born in 1921, in Paghman, a town near Kabul. His father was a minor civil servant. After study mathematic and physics at Kabul University, he became a high school teacher and later promoted to the principal position. In 1957, through a scholarship he went to study at Teacher's College at Columbia University, in New York. He returned for further studies and that time he joined with students who were interested in Marxism. *Karmal, was born in 1929, a member of the social and political elite. He was a son of General Muhammad Hussain Khan, who served as governor of Pakita Province and had close ties with the royal family.