Nur Muhammad Taraki (Pashto: نور محمد ترکی‎; 14 July 1917 – 9 October 1979) was an Afghan communist politician, journalist and writer.

He was a founding member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) who served as its General Secretary from 1965 to 1979 and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council from 1978 to 1979.

Taraki was born in Nawa, Ghazni Province, and he got his primary and secondary education from district Pishin in Balochistan and graduated from Kabul University, after which he started his political career as a journalist.

His regime locked up dissidents and oversaw massacres of villagers, citing the necessity of Red Terror by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, that opponents of the Saur Revolution had to be eliminated.

Taraki was born on 14 July 1917 to a Khilji Pashtun Tarakai peasant family in the Nawa District of Ghazni Province, part of what was then the Emirate of Afghanistan.

[6] He was the oldest of three children and attended a village school in Nawa,[7] before leaving in 1932 what had become the Kingdom of Afghanistan, at the age of 15, to work in the port city of Bombay, India.

Within several months, Taraki began denouncing the Royal Afghan Government under King Zahir, and accused it of being autocratic and dictatorial.

It also attracted unfavourable attention from authorities back home, who relieved him of his post and ordered him repatriated but stopped short of placing him under arrest.

After a short period of unemployment, Taraki started working for the United States Overseas Mission in Kabul as an interpreter.

[10] At the founding congress of the PDPA, held in his own home in Kabul's Karte Char district,[11] Taraki won a competitive election against Babrak Karmal to the post of general secretary on 1 January 1965.

The main differences between the factions were ideological, with Taraki supporting the creation of a Leninist-like state, while Karmal wanted to establish a "broad democratic front".

[14] On 17 April 1978, a prominent leftist named Mir Akbar Khyber was assassinated and the murder was blamed on Mohammed Daoud Khan's Republic of Afghanistan.

Internal struggle was not only to be found between the Khalqist and Parchamites; tense rivalry between Taraki and Amin had begun in the Khalq faction with both vying for control.

However, he ruled over a nation with a deep Islamic religious culture and a long history of resistance to any type of strong centralized governmental control,[28] and consequently many of these reforms were not actually implemented nationwide.

Popular resentment of Taraki's drastic policy changes triggered surging unrest throughout the country, reducing government control to only a limited area.

[33] Under the previous administration of Mohammad Daoud Khan, a literacy programme created by UNESCO had been launched with the objective of eliminating illiteracy within 20 years.

The cultural focus of the UNESCO programme was declared "rubbish" by Taraki, who instead chose to introduce a political orientation by utilizing PDPA leaflets and left-wing pamphlets as basic reading material.

[29] On 19 August 1978, Afghan Independence Day, Taraki started the broadcasts of Afghanistan National Television, the first TV channel in the country.

[36] Following the Herat uprising, Taraki contacted Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, and asked for "practical and technical assistance with men and armament".

Kosygin was unfavorable to the proposal on the basis of the negative political repercussions such an action would have for his country, and he rejected all further attempts by Taraki to solicit Soviet military aid in Afghanistan.

On his way back he stopped in Moscow on 20 March and met with Brezhnev, foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and other Soviet officials.

It was rumoured that Karmal was present at the meeting in an attempt to reconcile Taraki's Khalq faction and the Parcham against Amin and his followers.

[3] Taraki could count on the support of four prominent army officers in his struggle against Amin: Aslam Watanjar, Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy, Sherjan Mazdoryar and Assadullah Sarwari.

In reality, through this maneuver Taraki had effectively reduced Amin's power base by forcing him to relinquish his hold on the Afghan Army in order to take on the supposedly heavy responsibilities of his new but ultimately powerless post.

[44] During Taraki's foreign visit to the 6th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Cuba, his Gang of Four had received an intelligence report that Amin was planning to arrest or kill them.

[39] Shortly afterward, Taraki, instead of reporting to the cabinet about the Havana Summit, indirectly tried to dismiss Amin from his position as per the plot of the Soviets.

Soviet Ambassador Puzanov managed to persuade Amin to make the visit to the palace along with Sayed Daoud Tarun, the Chief of Police, and Nawab Ali (an intelligence officer).

Shortly afterwards, Amin placed the Army on high alert, ordered the detainment of Taraki, and telephoned Puzanov about the incident.

On 15 September, a Soviet battalion at Bagram Air Base and the embassy were put in position in an attempt to rescue Taraki, but they were never ordered to make a move as they felt that Amin's forces had the edge.

[50] In the 2 January 1980 edition of the Kabul New Times (the day of the PDPA's 15th anniversary), the education minister Anahita Ratebzad called Taraki "the martyred son of the country", and denounced Hafizullah Amin as "this savage despot, beastly, lunatic, and recognised spy of the imperialism of America".