On the outskirts of Teheran, deep within one of the largest graveyards in the world, Behest-e Zahra, is a singular tomb, a shrine to a 13-year-old Iranian child soldier Mohammed Hossein Fahmideh. It’s a tomb which holds invaluable secrets about the outcome of the American war with Iran.
Fahmideh was killed in October 1980 during the first battles of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, a bloody conflict, costing over 500,000 lives, between Saddam Hussein and the newly born Islamic Republic of Iran.
Fahmideh blew himself up with grenades and explosives trying to stop an Iraqi tank advance. In death, he became something else; a shahid, a martyr, and the beginning of the cult of the suicide bomber.
During the course of filming Channel Four’s Cult of the Suicide Bomber series, I was one of the few westerners ever to meet Fahmideh’s family in Tehran – who were adamant that their brother and son was a martyr, a hero, not a suicide victim. At Fahmideh’s grave a daily procession of worshippers came to offer gifts and pray at his shrine in vindication of that belief.
Fahmideh’s self-sacrifice was quickly seized upon by the Islamic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as an exemplary act of patriotism, and the child became a poster-boy for the regime. Soon, the dead Fahmideh was being painted alongside Khomeini in 12-storey high murals in downtown Teheran, the grandfather and the grandson of the revolution.
Fahmideh’s mythic death was used by the regime to inspire hundreds of thousands of poorly armed, and poorly trained, volunteers, known as basiji, to head willingly for the slaughtering grounds of the front – where many died in human wave frontal assaults across impassible Iraqi mine fields and stalemated trench warfare.
But even as the death toll mounted, Khomeini’s chaotic Islamic regime embraced rather than denied the futile slaughter of their sons; the fountains of Behest-e Zahra were dyed red to symbolise their righteous martyrdom.
Uniquely in the Islamic world, Iran is a Shia state, whose fundamental religious ideology is inspired by the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson Iman Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680, where Hussein’s 70 men were massacred by a 4,000-strong army of his Sunni enemy Yazid. The cult of martyrology, and revenge for defeat by an overwhelming enemy, is part of Shi’ism’s religious DNA. Although Khomeini’s regime did not invent the concept of Shia martyrdom, it was the first to weaponise those beliefs in modern warfare.
In November 1982, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, exported the cult of the suicide bomber to southern Lebanon where a local Lebanese Shia, Ahmed Qasir, aged 19, drove into a base of the invading Israeli army and detonated a car packed with explosives; 71 Israelis were killed, the largest daily death toll inflicted on the IDF up until 7 October, 2023.
More car bomb suicide attacks, against the US Beirut Embassy in April 1983 and the October 1983 marine barracks bombings, which cost the lives of 243 US marines, soon followed. Attacks that forced the Reagan administration to withdraw from Lebanon.
In Lebanon, the Lebanese Shia, a far more formidable opponent than the PLO, kept up a steady drumbeat of suicide bomb attacks against occupying Israeli forces until the IDF too was forced to withdraw to a so-called border security zone, two to seven miles deep, along the border in 1985. It was a defeat for the all-powerful IDF. Holding hostile territory against a swarm of suicide car bombers was far too costly militarily.
The same pattern of endless car suicide bomb attacks, so-called martyrdom operations, would also drive the Americans and the British from Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion.
Since the Iraq war, the US military has spent billions trying to find ways to technologically defeat the suicide car bomber, sometimes dubbed the poor man’s air force, but no one has yet found an answer.
At the weekend, US ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told Fox News that the US military is preparing options for the President ‘to have forces that are trained, equipped, in position and ready for whatever he chooses to do as commander in chief.’ Trump himself has not ruled out a ground invasion, and has reportedly discussed the prospect of deploying US troops with White House aides and Republican officials.
He should keep in mind that war in the air and war on the ground are two entirely different battlefields. Once you have troops on the ground, within range of a man or a would-be martyr with a car and explosives, your overwhelming western military advantage – air power, drone surveillance and missile technology – disappears.
Protective berms, blast proof walls, metal detector screenings, and electronic scramblers can mitigate but they cannot entirely stop the risk from an Afghan peasant on a moped with a $50 suicide bomb vest.
Iran has a population of 93 million, Teheran alone has 17 million, and geographically Iran is two thirds the size of western Europe. It is militarily inconceivable that American forces could successfully invade and sustain an occupation to force regime change without coming under prolonged resistance from regime elements inspired by Fahmideh and the cult of the suicide bomber. Even a limited invasion along the Iranian side of the Straits of Hormuz is likely to provoke the same form of suicidal assault. There will be a cost in American blood and treasure.
US President Trump may be about to discover Machiavelli’s maxim – that wars that begin when you will, do not end when you please.
Comments