DNA Explainer: Why Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had no choice but to flee

On Sunday, the last held fort of the Afghan government forces Kabul also fell into the hands of the Taliban. As they entered Kabul, the Taliban told the Ashraf Ghani government that a peaceful transfer of power would avoid bloodshed. Hours after the announcement, the US-backed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country to an undisclosed location leaving his countrymen in jeopardy.

By now the former President, Ashraf Ghani later took to his Facebook page to write, "To avoid bloodshed, I thought it would be better to leave."

Even as his political opponents blame that history would never forgive Ashraf Ghani for leaving his countrymen at the mercy of the Taliban, he had but little options to think otherwise. By escaping he saved himself from attaining the same fate as his predecessor, around three decades ago.

What happened to Ashraf Ghani's predecessor?

In 1992, when the Taliban closed in on Kabul, the then Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah was unable to flee the country and later got killed at the hands of the Taliban. The USSR-backed ruler since 1987 was intending to escape to India but fate had it otherwise.

Back then, as the Taliban came to the verge of taking over Kabul, Najibullah resigned. The operation by India to evacuate Mohammed Najibullah went wrong. The car in which he was being taken to the airport was stopped outside the airport gates by loyal guards of a warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, a friend turned foe of Najibullah.

Despite heated arguments, Najibullah was not allowed inside the airport nor could he return back to the President's palace. He was taken to the UN compound where he lived for the next four-and-a-half years in self-imprisonment.

After a four-year-long civil war, the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996 from Ahmad Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Massoud did offer to give Najibullah safe passage to the north, but he turned down the offer only later to get killed in the most barbaric manner at the hands of the Taliban along with his brother

Mohammed Najibullah's family however escaped to India months before he was deposed in 1992, and has lived in Delhi ever since.

About Mohammed Najibullah

A Pashtun, Mohammed Najibullah began his political career while he was a medical student at Kabul University.

Mohammed Najibullah started out as a member of the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan.

It was with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that Mohammed Najibullah's rise to political power began.

He became the security head of KHAD, the Afghan secret service that was run by the Soviet Union security agency, KGB.

In 1987, Moscow installed Mohammed Najibullah as the President of Afghanistan.

President Najibullah initiated steps for a return to peace, known as the National Reconciliation Policy (NRP).

Under the NRP, Najibullah reverted to the country's old pre-communist name of the Republic of Afghanistan.

Islam was declared the state religion, and the PDPA itself became the Hezb-e-Watan Party.