Andranik Ozanian

Andranik Ozanian, commonly known as General Andranik or simply Andranik (25 February 186531 August 1927), was an Armenian military commander and statesman, widely regarded as the preeminent fedayi and a seminal figure of the Armenian national liberation movement.

Andranik entered the armed struggle against the Ottoman government and Kurdish irregulars in the late 1880s. After joining the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), he led various fedayi units in defense of the Armenian peasantry within their ancestral lands in Western Armenia. Following the suppressed Sasun uprising, he went into exile, eventually breaking with the Dashnaktsutyun in 1907 over its brief rapprochement with the Young Turks—the faction that would later orchestrate the Armenian genocide. His military reputation grew during the First Balkan War (1912–1913), where he and Garegin Nzhdeh commanded a volunteer auxiliary within the Bulgarian army against Ottoman forces.