Early Life and Career
Najibullah was born in February 1947 in the city of Kabul, in the Kingdom of Afghanistan. His ancestral village is located between the towns of Said Karam and Gardēz in Paktia Province, this place is known as Mehlan. He was educated at Habibia High School in Kabul, St. Joseph's School in Baramulla Kashmir, and Kabul University, where he graduated with a doctor degree in medicine in 1975. He belongs to the Ahmadzai sub-tribe of the Ghilzai Pashtun tribe in Gardiz.
In 1965 Najibullah joined the Parcham faction of the Communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and in 1977 joined the Central Committee.
In April 1978 the PDPA took power in Afghanistan, with Najibullah a member of the ruling Revolutionary Council. However, the Khalq faction of the PDPA gained supremacy over his own Parcham faction, and after a brief stint as Ambassador to Iran, he was dismissed from government and went into exile in Europe.
Read more about this topic: Mohammad Najibullah
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)