The People's Defense Central Headquarters Command (HSM) has issued a statement to pay tribute to the fallen HRE commander, Karker Tolhildan. The statement underlined commander Tolhildan’s important role in the Kurdish freedom struggle and provided information about his life.

The Efrîn Liberation Forces (HRE) had announced last Wednesday that their co-founder and commander fell as a martyr in June last year in the resistance against the Turkish occupation of the northern Syrian region of Afrin.

The People’s Defense Central Headquarters Command said that before his ten-year commitment to defending the Rojava revolution, Karker Tolhildan was one of the commanders of the Hêzên Taybet special unit in the mountains of Kurdistan. The statement provided the following information about commander Tolhildan:

 Code name: Karker Tolhildan

 First and last name: Rıdvan Ulugana

 Place of birth: Bedlîs

 Mother's and father's names: Saide - Kıyasettin

 Date and place of death: June 10, 2023 / Efrîn

Karker Tolhildan was born in a village in Bitlis (Bedlîs) and belonged to the long-established Bekiran tribe from the Serhed region. The Bekiran tribe has preserved its existence through constant resistance and has fought against the Ottoman Empire and Tsarist Russia. This tradition of resistance was also maintained during the First World War against the Russian invasion of the Serhed region and the subsequent genocide of the Armenian population.

The Bekiran had close ties with their Armenian neighbors and were able to protect some of them. After the founding of the Republic of Turkey (1923), the tribe took an active part in the Agirî uprising (Ararat uprising) between 1927 and 1930, and thousands of tribesmen were murdered in the Zîlan massacre. Many survivors were expelled from Kurdistan to western Turkey, and some families settled in the village of Axçira in Bedlîs-Adilcewaz.

Since the 1990s, numerous people from Axçira have joined the Kurdish freedom struggle.

Karker Tolhildan grew up in this village. As a child, he tended sheep and enjoyed life in the untouched countryside of Kurdistan. After his older sister Ronahî (Aynur Ulugana) joined the guerrillas, Karker stopped his studies in Eskişehir and followed her to the mountains in 2016.

For him, guerrilla life was an expression of his people's ancient longing for freedom. Shortly after his sister Ronahî, he too joined the Hêzên Taybet, a special unit that requires ideological depth and explicit willingness to make sacrifices. He took on responsibility for strategically important tasks in the Hêzên Taybet headquarters and in other areas.

In 2011, he went to the Amanos Mountains and led actions for the revolutionary people's war. In 2013, he crossed the Turkish-Syrian border with his fellow fighters Şiyar Malatya, Mazlûm Cîger, Dewran Faraşîn, Mervan Ûrfa, Xebat Wan, Piling Adiyaman, Ronî Rojhilat and Xabûr Dêrik and came from Amanos to Afrin to defend the revolution in Rojava. The group consisted of select apoist militants.

In the following ten years, Karker fought for a free and self-determined life for the people of Afrin, Shehba and Aleppo and defended the region with great courage and tactical creativity against Islamist attacks and Turkish occupiers. After the occupation of Afrin in spring 2018, he and others founded the resistance group HRE, which is fighting for the liberation of the region and the return of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

Karker Tolhildan's cousin Egîd (Vedat Ulugana) was killed in the liberation struggle in 2016, his sister Ronahî in 2021 in Amed.