Reuters, Baghdad, 11 July 2014 – “We were kind of nervous, not because we are cowards, because it was our first fight and we were still young,” said the youth, a former teen soccer star from Baghdad.
He says he was 15 when an Iraqi Shi’ite militia first sent him to Iran for training by the Revolutionary Guards in hills outside of Tehran in March. He spent his 16th birthday four months ago in Syria fighting on the frontline near Damascus.
Now, he says he is back in Iraq fighting against Sunni insurgents.
“We got some military experience in Syria with raiding, and skills we learned in Syria help us in Samarra,” he said.
No one knows for certain how many underage fighters are participating in Iraq’s civil war. The official recruitment age for Iraq’s army is 18.
His name is not being printed to protect his identity. Reuters was not able to see documents to verify his age, but if anything he looked even younger than 16. His parents declined to be interviewed.
The Badr Organisation, a Shi’ite group which the youth said recruited him, denies it fields underage fighters.
After his brief training in Iran earlier this year, the youth said he spent six weeks in the Damascus suburb of Melliha with a Shi’ite unit fighting against the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. Nearly half of the 130 fighters in his contingent were wounded or killed there, he said, describing intense fighting on rooftops and alleyways.
“SURPRISED HOW YOUNG THESE GUYS WERE”
Two fighters from the Iran-trained Kata’ib Hezbollah and the Abu Fadl al-Abbas Brigades that have also sent thousands of volunteers to Syria told Reuters they attended training this month in Baghdad with boys turning 16 or 17.
“SIGNING UP ALL AGES”
Iraq is a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls on governments to shield children younger than 15 from participating in combat. Reuters was not able to find evidence of fighters that young, although there was substantial evidence of fighters close to that age and below Iraq’s official recruitment age of 18.