Afghan President Taraki Assassinated by His Own Deputy

Afghan President Nur Muhammad Taraki, who had seized power in a Marxist coup just seventeen months earlier, was smothered with a pillow on the orders of his own deputy on September 14, 1979. The killing of Taraki by Hafizullah Amin’s guards inside the presidential palace in Kabul set in motion a chain of events that would draw the Soviet Union into its most disastrous military adventure and reshape the geopolitics of Central Asia for decades. Taraki had come to power in the Saur Revolution of April 1978, when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan overthrew President Mohammed Daoud Khan. The new communist government immediately launched radical land reform, literacy campaigns, and attacks on traditional religious authority that provoked armed resistance across the countryside. By 1979, a full-scale insurgency was underway, and the PDPA was fracturing along factional lines between Taraki’s Khalq faction and internal rivals. Hafizullah Amin, Taraki’s prime minister and fellow Khalqi, had been consolidating power through the summer of 1979. Soviet leaders, alarmed by Amin’s brutality and suspicious of his contacts with American diplomats, pressured Taraki during a meeting in Moscow to remove Amin. The plot leaked. On September 14, Taraki summoned Amin to the palace for a meeting, reportedly intending to have him arrested or killed. Instead, a gunfight erupted between their respective bodyguards, and Amin’s men prevailed. Taraki was arrested, and the government announced he had resigned due to health reasons. He was quietly executed by suffocation weeks later. The Kremlin watched Amin’s consolidation of power with mounting alarm. Soviet intelligence concluded that Amin was unreliable, possibly even a CIA asset, and that Afghanistan risked slipping out of the Soviet orbit entirely. On December 24, 1979, Soviet forces invaded, killed Amin in a special forces assault on his palace, and installed Babrak Karmal as a puppet president. The resulting ten-year Soviet-Afghan war killed over a million Afghans, created millions of refugees, and incubated the jihadist movements that would produce both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.