The Basij and Child Soldiers in the Iran–Iraq War

During the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), hundreds of thousands of Iranians volunteered for the Basij, a militia under the Revolutionary Guards, and many of them were teenagers. Boys as young as 12 or 13 went to the front, some without their parents’ consent, and took part in mass infantry assaults and the clearing of minefields. In Iran they are honoured as martyrs of the “Sacred Defence”; human rights groups and many historians count them among the war’s child soldiers.

“An army of twenty million”

In November 1979, weeks after the seizure of the US embassy, Ayatollah Khomeini called for an “army of twenty million” to defend the revolution. The result was the Basij, a volunteer force recruited through mosques, schools, workplaces and villages. It was meant as a reserve of loyal citizens, and when Iraq invaded in September 1980 it became the channel through which ordinary people, many of them poor and religious, went to war.

Basij volunteers usually served short tours of a few months, then went home to school, work or farm and often came back for another stint. They received a few weeks of basic training, much of it ideological and religious, and were placed under Revolutionary Guards commanders. The regular army, purged and distrusted after the revolution, generally saw the Basij as brave but poorly prepared.

Who went, and why

The volunteers came overwhelmingly from working-class and rural families, and from small-town religious networks. Writers on the war, among them Mehran Riazaty and Saskia Gieling, describe the pull of a powerful martyrdom culture rooted in the story of Imam Hussein’s death at Karbala, the patriotic atmosphere of a country invaded, and the social status that service brought. Mosques organised dispatch ceremonies; schools hosted recruiters; families of martyrs were honoured publicly.

Regulations required minors to have their parents’ permission. In practice the rules were loosely applied: some boys forged signatures or lied about their age, others persuaded reluctant parents, and some families encouraged them. Memoirs by former volunteers describe headbands printed with religious slogans, written wills addressed to mothers, and the hope of dying as a martyr (شهید, shahid).

Fahmideh and the cult of the boy martyr

The most famous teenage fighter was Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh, a 13-year-old from Qom who went to the front at Khorramshahr without telling his family. According to the official account, on 30 October 1980 he strapped grenades to his body and blew himself up under an Iraqi tank, halting its advance. Khomeini praised him in a speech: “Our leader is that thirteen-year-old child.” Fahmideh’s face appeared on a postage stamp in 1986, and streets, schools and a stadium bear his name. The anniversary of his death is marked as Student Basij Day. The defence of the city is described on the page on Khorramshahr.

Human waves and minefields

From 1982, when Iran went on the offensive inside Iraq, Basij units were used in mass assaults against fortified Iraqi lines, often at night and with little artillery or air support. These “human wave” attacks overwhelmed defences at times but at enormous cost. Volunteers were also sent across minefields ahead of armoured and Revolutionary Guards units, effectively clearing a path with their bodies when there was no time or equipment for mine-clearing.

Some details of these tactics are contested. Foreign journalists in the 1980s reported that young volunteers wore small keys around their necks, said to be keys to paradise; the story was widely repeated abroad, but Iranian veterans and some researchers dismiss it as exaggerated or invented, and it is hard to verify. What is not disputed is that very young volunteers died in large numbers, and that Iraq captured many teenage prisoners, whose presence in its camps it publicised. The wider course of the fighting is told on the page on the Iran–Iraq War, 1982–1986.

Counting the young dead

There is no agreed count of how many under-18s served or died. Iranian institutions such as the Foundation of Martyrs keep detailed records of the war dead and commemorate school students among them, but do not separate a clear figure for minors that outside researchers accept. Western estimates of child soldiers at the front run from several thousand to tens of thousands, depending on the definition of “child” and the year. At the time, international humanitarian law set 15 as the minimum age for taking direct part in hostilities, in the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 1977; the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child came only in 1989, after the war.

Memory and debate in Iran

In the Islamic Republic, teenage volunteers are central to the memory of the war, called the “Sacred Defence” (دفاع مقدس, defâ’-e moghaddas). Their photographs line the walls of schools and mosques, and organised pilgrimages called Rahian-e Nur take students to the former battlefields in Khuzestan. Critics, including some former volunteers and Iranian writers, have questioned how freely children chose to go and whether commanders used them as expendable troops; they point out that the war continued for six years after Iran had recovered its territory in 1982. Supporters reply that the volunteers were defending an invaded country and that their sacrifice deserves respect, not judgement. The Basij itself survived the war and became a large domestic force, later used to police dress codes and suppress protests. For how the war ended, see the end of the Iran–Iraq War; for Iraq’s use of gas against these same troops, chemical weapons in the war.