Names of three female guerrillas who fell in Dersim announced

The HPG published the names of three guerrilla fighters who died in a Turkish air raid in Dersim last October.

The People's Defense Forces HPG (Hêzên Parastina Gel) commemorates three guerrilla fighters who died in Northern Kurdistan last year. According to a statement published by HPG Press Office, Emine Çiftçi (Dilan Cotkar), Beyan Dara (Melsa Tilora) and Havva Baran (Amara Çiya) died on 5 October 2019 in an air raid of the Turkish army in the province of Dersim.

According to HPG, Emine Çiftçi was born in 1986 in Kurtalan district of Siirt as the daughter of a patriotic family. Her birthplace is particularly marked by the dirty and bloody war waged by the Turkish state against the Kurdish people in the 1990s. This fact led to the liberation philosophy of the Kurdish liberation movement taking a central place in Emine Çiftçi's life from an early age. Thus, she developed the understanding of the necessity of not being able to live a free life without resistance against the fascist state system of Turkey at an early age and decided to join the guerrilla at the age of 18. From 2004 to 2010 she stayed in different regions of Kurdistan, always in the front line of the struggle. She spent the last nine years of her life in Dersim.

Beyan Dara was born in 1992 in Hakkari province. She also grew up in a patriotic environment and got to know the PKK at an early age. Many times she witnessed the invasive methods used by the Turkish state to fight the Kurdish population. In 2010 she decided to take to the mountains.

Havva Baran was born in 1996 in Amed (Diyarbakir). Her environment was also characterised by patriotism whose central component was a mixture of the awareness of a free life and the resistance culture of the PKK. In 2014 she went to Dersim to join the struggle against the oppression and assimilation policy of the Turkish state in the mountains there.

The HPG described all three women as pioneering personalities and leading figures of the guerrilla struggle, who selflessly and with dedication followed the revolutionary-military line of the leader Abdullah Öcalan. In view of the loss of the fighters, the People's Defense Forces expressed their condolences to the relatives of Emine Çifti, Beyan Dara and Havva Baran and the Kurdish people and promised to continue their resistance "until fascism is driven out of Kurdistan and the flag of victory is waved over the motherland.”