Mohammad Yusuf

Mohammad Yusuf (January 21, 1917 – January 23, 1998) was Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Afghanistan from March 10, 1963, to November 2, 1965. Yusuf was a technocrat and served under the reign of Mohammed Zahir Shah. He was born into a Qizilbash family in Chindawol, Kabul. He is considered the first Afghan prime minister to not be part of the royal family. He resigned on October 29, 1965.

Yusuf's predecessor, Mohammed Daoud Khan, had made him Minister of Mines and Industries in 1953, a position in which he would serve for 10 years (prior to which he had been Deputy Minister of Education from 1949 to 1953). After serving as prime minister, he was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union, but left this post in 1973 following Daoud Khan's coup. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he went into exile in Germany, where he lived until his death. His family moved to the west during the fall of the Communist Regime in Afghanistan, to the United States.

Before his political career, Yusuf had a tenure as a professor at Kabul University for over three decades, starting in 1949.