page_title: Children in the military
section_title: Iran
hierarchical_section_title: Children in the military / Children in the military today—by region and country / Middle East / Iran
caption_attribution_description: English: Iranian soldier during Iran-Iraq War. فارسی: کودک ایرانی در جنگ ایران و عراق.
context_page_description: Children in the military are children who are associated with military organisations, such as state armed forces and non-state armed groups. Throughout history and in many cultures, children have been involved in military campaigns. For example, thousands of children participated on all sides of the First World War and the Second World War. Children may be trained and used for combat, assigned to support roles such as porters or messengers, or used for tactical advantage as human shields or for political advantage in propaganda.
  Children are easy targets for military recruitment due to their greater susceptibility to influence compared to adults. Some are recruited by force while others choose to join up, often to escape poverty or because they expect military life to offer a rite of passage to maturity.
  Child recruits who survive armed conflict frequently suffer psychiatric illness, poor literacy and numeracy, and behavioral problems such as heightened aggression, leading to a high risk of poverty and unemployment in adulthood.
context_section_description: Current Iranian law officially prohibits the recruitment of those under 16.
  During the Iran–Iraq War, children were drafted into the Basij army where, according to critics of the Iranian government, they "were sent to the front as waves of human shields". Other sources have estimated the total number of all Iranian casualties to be in the 200,000–600,000 range. One source estimates that 3% of the Iran–Iraq War's casualties were under the age of 14.
  There were Iranian children who left school and participated in the Iran–Iraq War without the knowledge of their parents, including Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh. Iraqi officers claimed that they sometimes captured Iranian child soldiers as young as eight years old.
  As of 2018 the Iranian government has been recruiting children from Iran and Afghanistan to fight in the Syrian Civil War on the side of forces loyal to the Assad government.
caption: An Iranian child soldier after the Liberation of Khorramshahr
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