As Qasem Soleimani bashed the United States for its past and present policies toward Iran at a speech in the western Iranian city of Hamadan on July 26, surrounded by posters of commanders who have died under his command, one woman sat quietly, holding in her hands a framed picture of a young man, listening eagerly to the commander of the powerful Quds Force.

“You [the United States] are threatening us? … You are betting on counter-revolutionaries,” Soleimani roared, taking a swipe at Kurdish militants in his 87-minute speech. “You are making a big mistake. … You know our power in asymmetrical warfare.”

The picture in the woman’s hand was of Mohammad Ghafari, a former dentistry student who lost his life in pursuit of Soleimani’s asymmetrical warfare. The fallen soldier was a member of the Saberin, a special forces unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that was created in 2000 specifically to be used in counter-guerrilla warfare.

In their first major battle, the Saberin faced the fighters of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), an armed group based in the border area between Iran and Iraq. Baran Beritan, once a management student at Urmia University in northwestern Iran, was a PJAK fighter in the summer of 2011, when the Saberin and other IRGC units attacked the group on the peaks of the Qandil Mountains. Ghafari and his fellow soldiers were easy targets for Beritan and other PJAK fighters, who were both experts in guerrilla warfare and familiar with the terrain. Indeed, many Iranian Kurds had been fighting in the ranks of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) against the Turkish army and its counter-guerrilla force since the late 1990s, before they set up PJAK in 2004, specifically for Iranian Kurdistan, referred to as Rojhelat in Kurdish.