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March 30, 2026 10:00PM EDT | News Release

Iran: Military Stepping Up Child Recruitment
Campaign Lowers Minimum Age to 12


Iranian security forces stand guard on top of an armored vehicle in Tehran on March 21, 2026. © 2026 AFP via Getty Images

(Beirut) – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is conducting a campaign to recruit children as young as 12 to volunteer to become “homeland defending combatants,” Human Rights Watch said today. The military recruitment and use of children is a grave violation of children’s rights and a war crime when the children are under 15.

On March 26, 2026, an official from the IRGC’s 27th Mohammad Rasulullah Division in Tehran said that a campaign to enlist civilians, called “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” had set the minimum age at 12. Amid thousands of attacks by the United States and Israel across the country, children at military facilities would be at serious risk of death and injury. Iranian officials should revoke the campaign and prohibit all military and paramilitary forces in Iran from enlisting children under 18.

“There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds,” said Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.”

The campaign aims to attract civilians to provide cooking services and medical care, distribute items, and deal with damaged homes, as well as for security activities such as staffing checkpoints, operational patrols, intelligence patrols, and vehicle convoys, said Rahim Nadali, an IRGC official, in an interview with Iran’s Defa Press News Agency. The advertising poster for the recruitment drive, published by the news agency, also lists these activities and features two children, a boy and a girl, alongside two adults, including a man in a military uniform.

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