Mohammed Hossein Fahmideh
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Hossein Fahmideh, was a 13 year old boy who is praised by Iranians as a true veteran. During the Iran-Iraq war he made his decision to leave his home and go to the south of Iran to stop the invasion of the Iraqi army. He fought side by side with the older Iranian soldiers and held the Iraqi troops back despite his young age. Iraqi troops however at one stage pushed the Iranian troops back and at this stage they were going through a very narrow canal. At that point many Iranian troops nearby had been injured/killed by the heavy Iraqi attacks. Hossein knew that his time would be up sooner or later; therefore he grabbed a hand grenade off one of the nearby bodies and pulled the pin out as he ran and jumped underneath an enemy tank, killing himself and disabling the tank. This stopped the Iraqi tank division's advance. Chemical weapons such as nerve gas and mustard gas were used very soon after by Saddam however and killed over 100000 Iranian civilians.
It is still quite unknown how this boy could have got into the army as being at least 16 years old was a prerequisite for becoming an Iranian soldier during the war. Some say that this was because of the fact that he looked much older than his age and some say that at that particular stage the Iranian army was taking whatever it could to defeat the Iraqis who were supported by and had weapons supplied from more than 10 western countries including USA, France, Germany, Holland, UK, Russia, Brazil etc., and enjoyed the support of the entire Arab World, with the exception of Syria and Libya.
Ayatollah Khomeini declared Fahmideh Iranian national hero, claaing him "our leader" and a monument to Fahmideh was erected in Tehran, a place of pilgrimage of young Iranians.[1][2]
A former CIA officer Robert Baer in his 2005 documentary The Cult of the Suicide Bomber [3] among other things tells the history of the Fahmideh in his attempts to trace the origins of "suicide bombing" in the modern Muslim world.
