Mohammed Hossein Fahmideh

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Hossein Fahmideh, is considered a hero in Iran and an icon of the Iran-Iraq war. According to his official life story by the Iranian government, he was a 13 year old boy from the city of Qom who, on the outbreak of war in 1980, made his decision to leave his home without his parents knowledge to go to southern Iran to help stopping the invasion of Iran by the Iraqi army. In the besieged city of Khorramshahr, he fought side by side with older Iranian soldiers. At one point, Iraqi forces pushed the Iranian troops back as they were passing through a very narrow canal. Many of the Iranian troops present were either dead or wounded by the heavy Iraqi attacks. Hossein Fahmideh, therefore, took a grenade from a nearby body, pulled the pin out, and jumped underneath an Iraqi tank, killing himself and disabling the tank. This stopped the Iraqi tank division's advance.

The story of his death has never been truly verified, and different accounts for Fahmideh's real age has been given. Ayatollah Khomeini called him "a 12-year old child", while originally the Iranian media had reported his age as 14. It remains a mystery how Hossein could have got into the army, seeing that the draft age for the Iranian Artesh was 16-years-old at the time. Some say this was due to the fact he looked much older than his age, while some say that at that particular stage, the Iranian army was taking whomever it could to defeat the Iraqis, who were supported by and had weapons supplied from more than 10 Western countries and almost the entire Arab world.

Ayatollah Khomeini declared Fahmideh an Iranian national hero and a monument to Fahmideh was erected on the outskirts of Tehran, a place of pilgrimage of young Iranians.^[1]^[2] In the years following Hossein's death, murals where erected throughout Iran, book bags displaying Hossein were sold to children, and a postage stamp was issued for his memory in 1986.