Lies and fabrications of Nicholas Blanford: what is new, right?

So Blanford makes this claim that Hizbullah lowered the age of fighter from 18 to 16.  What is his evidence? It gets flimsy as usual:  "showed a slim youth with a mop of dark hair who looked even younger than his 16 years".  Because this guy is notorious for his lies and fabrications on all matters related to Hizbullah (look at his typical methods of documentation: "According to people close to Hezbollah and Shiite residents of the northern Bekaa Valley"), I in fact read this yesterday, and sent inquiries to my sources in Lebanon to check. The first thing that people told me is this: Al-Akhbar and As-Safir have much closer relationship with Hizbullah but how come the military branch of Hizbullah instead of divulging secrets and information to allies in the media, they always seem to chose this hostile Western correspondent whose only known in Beirut for his hagiography of Rafiq Hariri (I am told he is working on a second edition because the first edition contained the earlier theory of Hariri family which did not accuse Hizbullah of responsibility).  So I asked my sources in Lebanon and here what I was told on this matter: Training age in Hizbullah was and remains 16 years of age.  Fighting age was and remains 18, with permission from parents.  They added another condition: that an only child won't be allowed to fight, even with parents' permission.  And the party, is always strict in its rules. In the militias of Lebanese and Palestinian organizations during the war, there were cases of fighters below the age of 16 even.  Hizbullah does have its own scouts and Blanford is never a stickler for facts. But wait: he here pretends that he understands Arabic so well that he carried a conversation in Arabic to his readers: "“They were only 10 meters from us, yelling ‘we are coming to kill you, O Rafideen’,” said the Hezbollah veteran".  Oh, yeah? Only they never use the word Rafideen but Rafidah.  This man's reportage is an anthology of lies and fabrications.