On March 26th, 2026, an official of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced that a civilian recruitment drive called “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran” had set its minimum enlistment age at 12. The campaign, run by the IRGC’s 27th Mohammad Rasulullah Division in Tehran, seeks volunteers for roles ranging from cooking and medical care to intelligence patrols, checkpoint duty, and vehicle convoys. An advertising poster features two children alongside adults in military uniform. Iran is recruiting children into a war zone.

The IRGC official Rahim Nadali, speaking to Iran’s Defa Press News Agency, explained the rationale with disarming candour: teenagers and young people had “repeatedly come and said that they want to take part.” This is not a defence. Children are especially susceptible to authority, ideology, and the appeal of belonging. Their willingness to volunteer does not constitute informed consent, and it does not transfer legal or moral responsibility from the state to the child.

Iran has a long history of child military service. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, authorities sent hundreds of thousands of children into combat, with tens of thousands killed. More recently, the IRGC dispatched Afghan immigrant children as soldiers to support the Assad government in Syria, with boys as young as 14 dying in combat. The current campaign continues that pattern in conditions made newly lethal by what Iran describes as tens of thousands of US and Israeli airstrikes against IRGC and Basij facilities across the country.

The legal position is clear. Recruitment of children under 15 into armed forces is a war crime under customary international law and prohibited under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Iran’s own laws permit recruitment of children as young as 15, already below the threshold of international obligation. Setting the bar at 12 places Iranian officials within reach of criminal liability. Human Rights Watch has noted that an unlawful US airstrike on a primary school in Minab, Iran on February 28th, 2026 killed dozens of schoolchildren, a prior war crime that makes the presence of children at military sites not merely unlawful but immediately dangerous.

Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch, was unsparing: “There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds. What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.” Iranian officials should revoke the campaign at once and prohibit all military and paramilitary forces from enlisting anyone under 18.

Sources: Human Rights Watch, “Iran: Military Stepping Up Child Recruitment,” March 30, 2026. Defa Press News Agency, interview with Rahim Nadali, March 26, 2026. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 37 and 38. Optional Protocol to the CRC on Children in Armed Conflict. UN Security Council resolutions on children and armed conflict. Human Rights Watch, “Iran: Unlawful Attack on Primary School in Minab,” March 2026.