Babrak Karmal

Babrak Karmal (6 January 1929 – 1 or 3 December 1996) was an Afghan communist politician. Born Sultan Hussein at Kamari near Kabul, he co-founded the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and led its Parcham faction. The Soviet intervention of December 1979 installed him as Afghanistan's leader after the assassination of Hafizullah Amin; he held power until Moscow removed him in 1986, and he died in Moscow a decade later. ¹

He was born Sultan Hussein on 6 January 1929 at Kamari, a village in Kabul Province, the son of Muhammad Hussein, a general in the Royal Afghan Army and former governor of Paktia and Herat. He attended the German-speaking Nejat High School and studied at the College of Law and Political Science of Kabul University from 1951, was arrested in 1953 for his student activism and released in 1956, and graduated in 1960. In prison he befriended Mir Akbar Khyber, who introduced him to Marxism; on release he changed his name to Babrak Karmal, "Comrade of the Workers'" in Pashto. ¹

The PDPA was founded in January 1965 in Nur Muhammad Taraki's home, and Karmal was one of four PDPA members elected to parliament that year. When the party split in 1967 he led the Parcham faction against Taraki's Khalq. Parchamites joined Mohammad Daoud Khan's 1973 takeover, but Daoud purged them from the mid-1970s; after the Saur Revolution of 1978 the Khalqists purged the Parchamites in turn, and Karmal survived in exile in Prague under Czechoslovak secret-police protection. ¹

In late 1979 the KGB brought Karmal to Moscow, and in December 1979 Soviet troops staged a coup, assassinated Amin and installed Karmal as Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and of the Council of Ministers. He introduced the "Fundamental Principles of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan", a general amnesty for those imprisoned under Taraki and Amin, and replaced the red Khalqist flag with a more traditional one. The English article records that these policies failed to win legitimacy: he was widely seen as a Soviet puppet, and under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet leadership deposed him in 1986 in favour of Mohammad Najibullah and exiled him to Moscow. ¹

Anahita Ratebzad persuaded Najibullah to let Karmal return to Afghanistan in 1991; he became an associate of Abdul Rashid Dostum and may have helped remove the Najibullah government in 1992, then left for Moscow again. He died there of liver cancer in 1996. The English article's lead dates his death "1 or 3 December 1996" and its text says "in early December 1996", while its infobox, the Arabic article and Wikidata give 3 December; the data record carries 3 December, marked debated. He was buried at Hairatan. ^{1 2 3}

No text read for this record attests Karmal's personal faith either way. Wikidata's structured religion claim is atheism, and the Arabic and Urdu articles file him by category under Afghan atheists, while the Urdu infobox gives Islam generically and the Arabic infobox leaves the field blank; filings and structured values are not attestations, and his party's Marxist programme is ideology, not a personal statement. The one personal-religion text runs the other way: the English article records that, at a meeting in Kabul, Karmal compared his ardour for the Soviet Union to his Muslim faith — a reported simile, which attests no school. His faith is therefore recorded as unknown, flagged for the founder, with the full configuration preserved in the data file. ^{1 2 4 3}

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