The Press Office of People’s Defense Forces (HPG) released a statement providing information about the actions carried out by the Martyr Doğan Zinar Unit by aircraft in the guerrilla-held Medya Defense Zones in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq).
The HPG statement on Monday includes the following:
“Between 12-18 August, the bases of the occupying Turkish army in Şehîd Delîl Western Zap region were targeted by our Martyr Doğan Zinar Unit by aircraft. The invaders in Girê FM, Girê Amediyê and Girê Bahar Resistance Area were hit from the air 7 times. As far as we could clarify, 8 invaders were killed, 11 invaders were injured, 1 air defence system and 6 positions were damaged as a result of the actions.
These actions are attributed to the memory of all our martyrs in the person of our Apoist self-sacrificial commanders, comrades Alan Milazgîr, Berwar Dêrsîm and Sara Tolhildan.”
In other news, HPG commander Alan Milazgîr and guerrilla doctor Sara Tolhildan were killed in tunnel resistance against the Turkish occupation forces in the Zap region. The People’s Defense Forces (HPG) made this public in an obituary on Friday. Regarding the circumstances of the deaths of the two fallen soldiers, the HPG explained that Alan Milazgîr and Sara Tolhildan had carried out a Fedai action against a base in order to protect fighters in a tunnel system from attacks by the occupiers.
The attack, described by the HPG as a “selfless offensive strike”, was reportedly intended to protect the tunnel system named after Doğan Savaş in the guerrilla area of Sîda and took place at the end of June; a high-ranking officer was killed. The underground tunnel system in Sîda was particularly badly affected by the use of chemical warfare agents and other banned weapons by the Turkish army. Invading troops tried to take over the facility for around three years.
“Driven by the spirit of apoism, our friends who were involved in the tunnel resistance in Sîda showed an almost superhuman will. They accomplished something historic when they fought back the genocidal and NATO-armed colonial state of Turkey and its occupying army for three years. Alan Milazgîr and Sara Tolhildan are two of these heroes. The traces their names leave in history will always show us the way,” explained the HPG. The organization provided the following information about the personal data of the fallen:
Code name: Alan Milazgîr
First and last name: Ender Budancer
Place of birth: Mûş
Names of mother and father: Hazal – Nusret
Date and place of death: June 21, 2024 / Zap
Code name: Sara Tolhildan
First and last name: Leyla Aykut
Place of birth: Adana
Names of mother and father: Gevre – Aziz
Date and place of death: June 21, 2024 / Zap
Alan Milazgîr
Alan Milazgîr was a member of the HPG Command Council and was part of the Operational Command in the Medya Defense Areas. He came from Milazgîr (tr. Malazgirt) in the province of Mûş and experienced the Turkish state’s dirty war in Kurdistan in the 1990s.
The experiences at that time were decisive in his decision to join the guerrillas on August 15, 1994, the tenth anniversary of the start of the armed resistance of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). For six years, he fought in the ranks of the HPG’s predecessor organization, ARGK, in various areas of the Botan region; it was the hot phase of the war. In 2000, he moved to the Medya Defense Areas.
Alan Milazgîr used the first phase in South Kurdistan to deal more intensively with the ideology and philosophy of the Kurdish liberation movement and to study the paradigm of Abdullah Öcalan. In 2005, he went to Northern Kurdistan as part of the revolutionary people’s war and fought in Dersim for seven years.
From 2014, he devoted himself to the resistance against the terrorist militia “Islamic State” (IS), including in Şengal. He played a key role in the liberation of the region, whose Yazidi population had become the target of genocide and femicide that year. From 2021 until his death, Alan Milazgîr was deployed as regional commander of the HPG in Zap. In this role, he also led the revolutionary guerrilla offensive “Bazên Zagrosê”, among other things.
Sara Tolhildan
Sara Tolhildan was born to a family belonging to the Kurdish Mamxurî tribe in Adana, southern Turkey. However, she grew up in Elkê (Beytüşşebap), her parents’ hometown in the Kurdish province of Şirnex, in an environment shaped by Kurdistan’s culture and traditions. In a world shaped by war, oppression and resistance, she matured into a reflective and enlightened personality.
Sara Tolhildan went to study in Amed (Diyarbakır). She was enrolled at the medical faculty of the university in the resistance stronghold and at that time got to know the Revolutionary Youth of Kurdistan. Although she had already experienced the contradictions resulting from the anti-Kurdish and misogynistic mentality of the Turkish state as a child, in the Kurdish youth movement she devoted herself particularly intensively to the special warfare methods that alienate young people from their identity and the patriarchal social policies of the rulers. She also studied the writings of Öcalan and his paradigm of a democratic nation based on women’s liberation, radical democracy and ecology.
Sara Tolhildan was a woman with an alternative life plan that she wanted to implement in the mountains of Kurdistan. It was the height of IS terror in Rojava and Şengal when she left university in her last semester and joined the guerrillas. Since an end to the jihadist violence was not yet in sight at the time and the Turkish state signaled the war of extermination against the Kurdish movement that had begun in the summer of 2015, Sara Tolhildan concentrated on military expertise right from the start of her membership of the Associations of Free Women (YJA Star).
In this context, she was initially deployed in the Avaşîn region of southern Kurdistan. In addition to her services on the front line, she also worked as a guerrilla doctor and cared for sick or injured fighters. “Hevala Sara treated her companions with great care and conscientiousness. With her strong friendship, she felt the pain of her counterpart and gave strength and morale.” She moved to the Zap front in 2021.
The HPG expressed their condolences to the relatives of Sara Tolhildan and Alan Milazgîr as well as to the Kurdish people.