The Press Office of the People’s Defense Forces (HPG) announced the identity details of a guerrilla fighter who died in early June in clashes with Turkish military units in the area of Deşta Silopiya near Mount Cudi in Şırnak countryside.

The death of the HPG member had already been announced on June 26 but his exact identity has been published only now.

Nom de Guerre: Kahraman Birîndar

First-Last Name: Ibrahim Algım

Birthplace: Şırnak

Mother's-Father's Names: Mevlüde – Sabri

Date and Place of Martyrdom: 8. June 2020 / Cudi

The province of Şırnak is located in the historical landscape of Botan, which was a semi-autonomous Kurdish principality under Ottoman sovereignty from the 15th to the 19th century. In 1847, the Ottomans crushed an uprising against the planned centralization of Botan - the principality was dissolved and incorporated into the Ottoman provinces.

Botan also contains the areas where 137 years later, on a warm August day in 1984, the PKK's armed liberation struggle began. This brought the region once again into the sights of the Turkish counterinsurgency. The state repression, which reached its peak in the 1990s when the Turkish army carried out large-scale operations and burned down thousands of Kurdish villages, and the resistance that the Kurdish liberation movement led together with the Kurdish people against it, also left its mark on Mevlüde and Sabri Algım, the parents of the fallen HPG fighter. Accordingly, Kahraman Birindar grew up in a patriotic environment that was under the impression of rebellion against oppression.

"Our comrade Kahraman felt connected to the resistant tradition of Botan, but went one step further and joined the guerrilla ranks," the HPG wrote in an obituary of the fallen fighter.

"Kahraman distinguished himself by his diligence and modest personality. With his deep love for the nature of Kurdistan and a passion for the mountains, he developed within a very short time into an accomplished guerrilla fighter. His focus was always on representing the professional guerrillas of democratic modernity. Kahraman Birindar fought until his last bullet against the Turkish occupying army, to which he inflicted heavy losses. Only then did he join the caravan of the martyrs. In view of the loss of our comrade, we express our sympathy to his relatives and to the Kurdish people. We promise to increase our struggle in memory of our fallen comrades in order to crown it with victory.”