Short answers, pulled from the story.
Babrak Karmal was an Afghan communist politician who served as leader of Afghanistan from December 1979 to 1986, holding the post of General Secretary of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. He was installed in power by the Soviet Union following the assassination of Hafizullah Amin and was widely viewed as a Soviet-backed leader by Afghans and the Western press. He died in Moscow in December 1996 from liver cancer.
Babrak Karmal was born Sultan Hussein on the 6th of January 1929. He changed his name after his release from prison in 1956, adopting Babrak Karmal, which translates in Pashto as "Comrade of the Workers." The name change was a deliberate rejection of his bourgeois background; his father, a lieutenant general in the Royal Afghan Army, disowned him over his leftist views.
Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan in December 1979 and assassinated Hafizullah Amin, the existing leader. Karmal, who had been in exile and was brought to Moscow by the KGB in late 1979, had a pre-recorded speech broadcast over Radio Kabul from Tashkent on the 27th of December 1979. He returned to Kabul on the 28th of December travelling with a Soviet military column and was formally confirmed as leader in the days that followed.
Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership concluded that Karmal was unable to secure national consolidation in Afghanistan and that his continued reliance on Soviet military support made a political solution impossible. Soviet officials attempted to persuade Karmal to resign during his March 1986 visit to the Soviet Union. After those efforts failed, KGB intelligence chief Vladimir Kryuchkov was sent to Kabul, and Karmal was ultimately pressured to resign the PDPA General Secretaryship at the 18th PDPA Central Committee plenum, with Mohammad Najibullah named as his successor.
Parcham was one of two main factions within the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan following the party's 1967 split. Karmal led the Parchamites, who were largely urban, wealthier, and Dari-speaking, as distinct from the rural, poorer, and predominantly Pashtun Khalq faction led by Taraki and Amin. The Khalqists called the Parchamites the "Royal Communist Party" because of their alleged ties to the Afghan monarchy.
After resigning the General Secretaryship in 1986, Karmal was exiled to Moscow, where he was given a state apartment and a dacha. He returned to Kabul on the 20th of June 1991 at Najibullah's invitation, but his apartment became a centre of opposition to Najibullah's government. After Najibullah fell in 1992, Karmal withdrew to Hairatan and later left Afghanistan again for Moscow, where he died in December 1996.