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Iran Recruits Children as Young as 12 for Tehran Checkpoints During War
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Iran has opened a new recruitment drive allowing children as young as 12 to sign up as “combatants defending the homeland,” according to RFE/RL on March 27.
The program was announced by Rahim Nadali, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps deputy director for culture in Tehran, and reported by multiple Iranian media outlets.
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“We launched a plan that we call For Iran, which is a registration plan for combatants defending the homeland,” Nadali stated in a television announcement. “We set the minimum age at twelve and above.”
Applicants were directed to mosques and registration booths in central squares as Iran framed the initiative as a response to public demand to support fighters amid US and Israeli strikes.
Official Iranian media reported that recruits could be assigned to patrols and checkpoint tours, as well as to distribute supplies and help repair homes damaged by attacks.
RFE/RL noted that this could place children directly at risk, as Basij checkpoints have already been hit in previous strikes. The outlet added that it could not independently verify Tehran’s claims because its journalists are not permitted to operate inside Iran.
Iran has a documented history of using children in military and security roles, including during the Iran-Iraq war.
The move also raises legal questions under international humanitarian and child protection law.
In general, the Geneva Conventions themselves do not set a normal peacetime draft age for a state’s own population. They are mainly concerned with the conduct of war, not with how individual countries design their conscription systems.
The closest rule in the Geneva Conventions framework appears in Additional Protocol I, which states that children under 15 must not be recruited into the armed forces or take direct part in hostilities.
Later, international law strengthened that standard. The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict requires states to ensure that persons under 18 are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces. It also provides that members of the armed forces who are under 18 should not take direct part in hostilities.
The clearest practical summary is that international law sets 18 as the minimum age for compulsory military draft, while each country’s domestic law determines the actual conscription age above that minimum.
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