TIME Photos: The Rise and Fall of the Khmer Rouge (Part1)

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Royal Seal of Approval

In 1965, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's head of state, asserted the nation's opposition to the U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam by allowing North Vietnamese guerrillas to set up bases within Cambodia's borders. The North Vietnamese had an alliance with a Cambodian Marxist insurgency group, the Khmer Rouge, whose top brass Sihanouk is pictured here with in 1973.

Bettmann / Corbis

Losing Control

A Cambodian soldier holds a .45 to the head of a Khmer Rouge suspect in 1973. When Sihanouk was forced out of power in a coup, the new Prime Minister, General Lon Nol, sent the army to fight the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Fighting two enemies proved to be too much for Cambodia's army. As Civil War raged from 1970 to 1975, the army gradually lost territory as Khmer Rouge increased its control in the countryside.

Christine Spengler / Sygma / Corbis

Coming Apocalypse

Survivors sift through rubble after the Khmer Rouge bombed Phnom Penh, the capital city, on January 1, 1975. Four months later, the party took the city, on April 17, 1975, and began their mission of returning Cambodia to an agrarian society, emptying the cities and forcing their countrymen into agricultural labor.

Claude Juvenal / AFP / Getty Images

Day One, Year Zero

Khmer Rouge fighters celebrate as they enter Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Prince Sihanouk, the party's early ally, resigned in 1976, paving the way for the now notorious Khmer Rouge founder and leader, Pol Pot, to become prime minister. The country was renamed Kampuchea, and it was the start Year Zero — the beginning of a new history for Cambodia written by Pol Pot.

Roland Neveu / OnAsia

Left Behind

Days before the occupation of the capital, thousands of Cambodians gather behind a school perimeter fence near the American embassy to watch the final evacuation of U.S. and foreign nationals.

GAMMA / Eyedea Presse
Death Sentence

A prisoner gets her mug shot taken. At prisons like Phnom Penh's infamous Tuol Sleng, prisoners were painstakingly documented before being sent to their deaths in mass graves later to be come known as the "killing fields." Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were tortured and executed under the Khmer Rouge; others starved or died from disease or exhaustion. In total, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died between 1975 and 1979.

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Pol Pot's Utopia

An undated photograph shows forced laborers digging canals in Kampong Cham province, part of the massive agrarian infrastructure the Khmer Rouge planned for the country.

Bettmann / Corbis

A New Occupier

Fed up with cross-border raids by Khmer Rouge, Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Dec. 25, 1978. By Jan. 7, shown here, Vietnamese troops had occupied Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia lasted for 10 years.

Kyodo News / AP

Fearless Leader

The Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot, too, driving the leader to the Thai border where he continued to head the Khmer Rouge in the jungles.

John Bryson / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images

Purging the Western Curse

The Khmer Rouge sought to rid Cambodia of all Western influences that distracted its people from their agrarian calling. Cars, abandoned and forbidden, were stacked up alongside the road.