Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh

Who is Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh?

Hossein Fahmideh, a war hero of 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 with Iraq, made his decision to leave his home without his parents knowledge to go to southern Iran and aid in the defense of Khorramshahr. 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 made the Iraqis think that the Iranians had mined the area which stopped the Iraqi tank division's advance.

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. 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 in his memory in 1986.