In most of the world, being 12 years old means you cannot drive, vote, drink, marry, sign a contract, or join the military. The international community spent the better part of the 20th century constructing the legal frameworks required to protect those facts.
Iran did not get the memo.
On March 26, 2026, IRGC deputy Rahim Nadali of the Mohammad Rasulullah Division in Tehran announced on state television that a new civilian enlistment campaign, the “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” had set its minimum age at 12.
“In relation to intelligence and operational patrols, teenagers and youth have repeatedly come forward saying they want to take part,” Nadali stated in a televised interview.
“Given the ages of those making demands, we have set the minimum age at 12. There are now kids aged 12 and 13 who want to be present in this space.”
The announcement came after weeks in which US and Israeli air forces had been targeting Basij personnel and facilities across the country. The IRGC was not recruiting children from a position of strength but rather desperation.
According to official statements, recruits were assigned to activities related to the IRGC’s “operational and security” functions, including patrols, checkpoint duties, logistical support, and assistance with food and medical tasks.
Those same checkpoints and patrols were being targeted daily by US and Israeli drone strikes.
Amnesty International analyzed multiple photos and videos posted online from March 21 onwards, showing children carrying AK-pattern assault rifles or standing alongside IRGC forces at checkpoints and during militarized rallies in Tehran, Mashhad, and Kermanshah.
Eyewitnesses in Tehran, Karaj, and Rasht reported the same.
One eyewitness told BBC Persian, “I saw a child at a checkpoint near our house… I think he was about 15. He just had the faint beginnings of a mustache. It seemed like he was struggling to breathe from the effort of lifting the gun. He was pointing the gun toward the cars.”
Another eyewitness from Karaj wrote, “Today [on March 27], I saw a child at a checkpoint. I think he was about 16. His facial hair hadn’t even grown. He was holding a Kalashnikov rifle.”
When children are handed weapons, there are catastrophic consequences
An eyewitness from Rasht wrote on March 30, “I have seen children wielding weapons. They wear masks to cover their faces, but it is obvious they are kids. They have not even grown in height… some appear to be 13 years old at most… I saw [several] children standing in front of mosques [where Basij bases are located], ahead of the actual forces.”
The consequences came within days.
On March 29, 11-year-old Alireza Jafari was killed at a checkpoint in Tehran when an Israeli drone struck the position. He had been taken there by his father, a Basij member who had reported a shortage of personnel that night.
His mother told Hamshahri newspaper that her husband had said the boy “must get prepared for the days ahead” and had brought him and his nine-year-old brother along.
Iranian authorities confirmed Alireza was killed “while serving.”
He was 11 – a year below the minimum recruitment age. Taken to a military target because there were not enough adults to fill the post. This is how the Islamic Republic is defending itself against the US, Israel, and its own people.
Iran has a precedent when it comes to using child soldiers. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Iranian officials recruited hundreds of thousands of children, and tens of thousands were killed.
Many of the families were conditioned to accept, and even embrace, the martyrdom of their children through a mix of religious messaging and financial incentives tied to loyalty to the first Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Boys as young as nine were reportedly recruited, often from poorer communities, and used to clear minefields. Families of those killed or injured received compensation through the Bunyad-e Shaheed, or Martyrs’ Foundation, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
The International Committee of the Red Cross later assessed that at least 10% of Iranian prisoners of war captured during the conflict were minors, although the full scale of child recruitment has never been definitively established.
The mythology of child martyrdom in Iran became institutionalized after the Iran-Iraq War.
In more recent decades, the IRGC sent Afghan immigrant children living in Iran as soldiers to support the Assad government in Syria. Human Rights Watch documented boys as young as 14 killed in combat.
The legal framework in Iran makes this possible. The IRGC’s Recruitment Regulations Law specifies that children under 15 can join the Basij’s ranks, effectively setting no floor on age.
Children over 15 can become “active” members, receiving financial compensation and weapons training to “collaborate with the IRGC in carrying out assigned missions.”
Under Article 13 of the law, Basij members are further divided into three classifications: ordinary, active, and special. Crucially, Article 93 permits those under 15 to be registered as ordinary Basij members, effectively removing any meaningful lower age limit.
“The Iranian authorities are shamelessly encouraging children as young as 12 to join an IRGC-run military campaign, putting them in grave danger and violating international law, which prohibits the recruitment and use of children in the military,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, at Amnesty International, stated.
“Recruiting children under 15 into the armed forces constitutes a war crime.”
Human Rights Watch was no less direct.
“There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds,” said Bill Van Esveld, the organization’s associate children’s rights director.
“What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.” War crime is a legal classification under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
There is also an uncomfortable question that the international community has so far declined to ask aloud: what happens the day a 12-year-old at a Basij checkpoint opens fire on a crowd?
Iran’s security forces have fired on protesters before – killing between 30 and 45,000 over two days on January 8-9, according to estimates – using adults with years of ideological conditioning and at least some psychological preparation for what pulling a trigger means.
A child has none of that. Neurologically, a 12-year-old’s prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain governing impulse control, risk assessment, and moral reasoning – will not finish developing for another decade.
Place that child in a uniform at a checkpoint, surrounded by the noise and pressure of a crowd, and the conditions for disaster and tragedy are already there for exploitation.
One witness told BBC Persian after seeing a child at a checkpoint, “I keep thinking their brains aren’t developed like adults, and they might actually fire randomly. I am both scared of them and feel sad for them.”
And if it happens – if a frightened child soldier fires on the wrong person at the wrong moment – it is the child who will carry the psychological weight of it.
Research on former child soldiers from Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Cambodia describes the same pathway: severe PTSD, dissociation, chronic shame, and difficulty reintegrating into civilian life.
The Cambodian example springs to mind. Ham Sarun was 13 or 14 when the Khmer Rouge came to his village in Cambodia.
“They came to our village and made me join,” he told this writer from Cambodia a few months ago about his indoctrination into the Khmer Rouge. “I was given a weapon and made to be a guard.”
Sarun was assigned to border duty, fighting Vietnamese forces, seeing combat two or three times a month, and receiving weapons training alongside daily ideological instruction.
“The Khmer Rouge filled us with their ideology, telling us that everyone had to work hard and be ready to fight the Vietnamese,” he explained.
“The Khmer Rouge picked me and told me to work hard, to train, and to be angry at the Vietnamese. They told us that the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia.
“Some who were with me believed in their teachings,” he said. “Some didn’t. We were taught we were a loving family and to love our country, but to hate the enemy. At the beginning, I believed what the Khmer Rouge taught us. But then I stopped.”
The Khmer Rouge, like the IRGC’s Basij today, understood that children absorb ideology readily, cannot fully process risk, and are hungry to belong. What makes a 12-year-old useful to a totalitarian paramilitary is the same thing that makes arming one so grotesque.
To understand the decision to lower the recruitment age to 12, it is important to understand the scale of what the Basij had lost. The militia had suffered heavy casualties and collapsing morale over the previous weeks, with US and Israeli strikes targeting checkpoints, facilities, and senior commanders across the country.
Gholamreza Soleimani, the forces commander, was killed in a March airstrike. The Basij, the force responsible not only for external defense but also for keeping the regime’s own population in line, was running short of adults willing to stand at its posts.
Rahim Nadali’s announcement could easily be taken as an admission that the regime has already exhausted its supply of willing adults and has turned to children.
Now, the checkpoints are staffed by 12-year-olds with Kalashnikovs, told that the people in front of them are enemies of God and enemies of Iran. Like Ham Sarun, who was conditioned by the Khmer Rouge, Iran’s children are being indoctrinated to serve the nation and hate the enemy.
Nobody in the IRGC announced they were conscripting child soldiers, but rather that the children wanted to serve.
They said the minimum age was lowered because demand required it and produced a recruitment poster showing a boy, a girl, and two adults under the slogan “Basij with people, for people.” It looked like an advertisement for a school sports program.
Ham Sarun survived the Khmer Rouge because the regime collapsed around him.
He has spent decades since then describing what it was like to be handed a weapon as a child and told to love his country and hate the enemy. He believed it at first, and then he stopped.
The 12-year-olds registering at mosques in Tehran may get the same chance to stop believing if the regime around them collapses. Or it could be that a drone or a stray bullet makes that question irrelevant before they are old enough to understand what is happening.