Mick Hartley

Iranian religious scholar Mohammad-Bagher Heydari Kashani, in a televised lecture, praises Iran's child martyrs:

"All the theoreticians in the world mistakenly believe that population size and growth are a symbol of power… We're talking about Islamic Iran, which needs to build a cadre and manpower for the movement that is expecting [the Hidden Imam]. We're talking about Islamic Iran, where each and every one of its offspring can become [like] Hajj Qasem Soleimani. […]

"We had 36,000 student martyrs [in the Iran-Iraq War], 7,070 of whom were under the age of 14. […]

"They were a source of pride for us, and we must thank God for them. Many of us are ungrateful. […]

"They achieve a status in which they become God's beloved, his favorites. Sometimes, we are the ones who love God, but other times, He is the one Who, in His divinity, falls in love with us. This is the horizon that our children should aim for."

Children were provided with keys to allow them to enter heaven, sometimes as they were sent to walk across minefields:

The promise of immediate entrance to heaven for martyrs was a key point of emphasis for Iranian leaders. In speeches, religious officials often repeated the promise of seventy-two virgins, and young men were given keys to wear around their necks that supposedly granted them instant access to heaven upon death. Slogans on the soldiers' shirts read "Imam Khomeini has given me special permission to enter Heaven."

More details here:

According to the “Foundation for Preserving and Promoting the Values of the Sacred Defense,” an affiliate of the Iranian Armed Forces’ General Headquarters, during the eight-year war with Iraq, more than 33,000 high school students were killed, 2,853 were injured and 2,433 were taken prisoner. According to a report by human rights organization Child Soldiers International, “boys as young as nine were reportedly used in human wave attacks and to serve as mine sweepers in the war with Iraq.”

As one analyst puts it, the “exceptionally high ratio of dead to wounded (in a conventional war between professional armies the number of wounded is higher than the number of those killed) reflects the children's lack of military training: They were used as cannon fodder in human-wave attacks launched by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against the Iraqi forces.”

No figures are available for the number of religious scholars who volunteered to walk across minefields holding keys to heaven, but I'm guessing it's somewhere around zero.