Carlak was born in 1899. Depending on the sources, his hometown is reported as Baghdad or Samarra. His family was of Iraqi Turkmen descent, originally from Kirkuk, Iraq. In his early teens, he met Meral, the daughter of Sheikh Tahir, a Turkmen tribal leader, and got engaged to her. Just before the wedding, World War I broke out and Carlak had to leave her. His activity during the war is unknown, but at the end he was in India, where he lived for some time in the jungle. While in Iran, he found out accidentally that the family of his fiancée had moved nearby. While planning his wedding again, he read in a newspaper that in Turkey the struggle for independence had begun. Deciding to join the insurgents, both tried to reach Anatolia. As they passed through a steep-sided gorge, his fiancée slipped, fell down a cliff and was killed. Carlak then reached the insurgents, serving under Kâzım Karabekir in the eastern front of the Turkish War of Independence. Then Carlak fought in Antep and Kilis, and belonged to one of the formations that recaptured Smyrna from the Greeks. He was wounded in the war and for his courage he received the Medal of Independence with red ribbon. Immediately after the war, Carlak settled in Manisa, which had been devastated by a fire caused by the retreating Greek army during the Greco-Turkish War. Struck by the consequences of the fire, Carlak made it his life's goal to reforest the region, single-handedly planting and cultivating innumerable trees on Mount Sipylus.