"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 outisde 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, referring to a frontline Iraqi city where Shi'ite paramilitaries helped government forces halt an advance by Sunni militants.
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. Shiite militia which fight alongside government force also say they do not recruit children.
But with Sunni insurgents sweeping across the country and thousands of Shiites answering a cleric's call to take up arms against them, there is anecdotal evidence that child fighters are being sucked into Iraq's sectarian war.
Witnesses say they have frequently seen adolescents among the Sunni fighters at checkpoints in the north.
The Shiite youth, who spoke to Reuters in Baghdad during what he described as a few days respite from the battlefield in Samarra to visit his family, says he was drawn to the war to save his fellow Shiites from the Islamic State, a Sunni group that says all Shiites are heretics who must repent or die.
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 Shiite group which the youth said recruited him, denies it fields underage fighters.
"We respect childhood because children are the promising future of Iraq," said Ali Al-Allaq, a senior member of the Badr Organisation. "We are the most prominent group in liberating areas so far, so some young people may be bragging that they are fighting for us. But that is not true."
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office said the government demanded that paramilitary groups refrain from recruiting children: "The government has been clear that volunteers should be of adult age and should all come under the command and control of Iraqi security forces."
"Go, son, do your duty"
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.He is not sure if he has killed anyone, but he watched one of his fellow militia fighters drill a bullet between the eyes of a Nusra Front militant who sneaked into the building where they were sleeping.
When he returned to Iraq, the Sunni group then known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL) had launched its lightning advance from Syria across the north of Iraq. He went to Samarra to help halt the advance on Baghdad, with his family's blessing.
"Mum was happy. She said, 'Go, son, do your duty,'" he said......................http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/features/2014/07/12/Underage-fighters-drawn-into-Iraq-sectarian-war.html
12/7/14
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Related:
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British security forces will find it impossible to monitor all the estimated 500 jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq after they return home
Britain threatened by UK jihadist fighters in Syria "for many years to come". - An estimated 12,000 foreign fighters have gone to Syria since the war began
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