He was born into a Kurdish family whose members were resettled in the aftermath of the Dersim rebellion. He was among the early members of a group around Abdullah Öcalan, Haki Karer, Mazlum Doğan and Cemîl Bayik which held regular ideological meetings from 1973 onwards and which would later become to be known as the "Kurdistan Revolutionaries". In December 1974 he was shortly detained together with Öcalan and Kalkan, before the was closed down. He was among the co-founders of the Kurdistan Workers' Party which was established in November 1978. At the second party congress, which took place in Lebanon, the PKK decided to send him to Europe in order to raise support. On the 22 July 1984 he took part in a decisive meeting in a PKK camp in the Lolan valley in Iraq where the decision was to begin with the insurgency. Cemil Bayik and Duran Kalkan took also part in the meeting. He returned to Germany, where he was arrested in 1988 and during the Kurdish Trial in Düsseldorf, he was accused of being a member of a so-called revolutionary court in Barelias, Lebanon which sentenced two people to death. During his arrest he entered into a hunger strike several times in protest of the pre-trial detention conditions. He was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment on the 7 March 1994 for being a member of a terrorist organisation, but the murders were not taken into account. The judges though ruled that the murders fell under the a Lebanese amnesty which covered crimes which occurred during the Lebanese civil war. He was released immediately due to his years in pretrial detention together with Duran Kalkan, who was also charged with being a member of a terrorist organization. Afterwards he returned to Kurdistan and today he is a member of the co-presidency council of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK).