It was recently reported that 11-year-old Alireza Jaafari, a fifth-grade student, was killed in Iran while serving as a Basij member in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This comes after Human Rights Watch reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is conducting a campaign to recruit children as young as 12 to volunteer to become “homeland defending combatants.”
An official from the IRGC’s 27th Mohammad Rasulullah Division in Tehran said on March 26 that a campaign to enlist civilians, called “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” had set the minimum age at 12. There was a small video clip of an IRGC official posted recently that claimed that they have decided to recruit children as young as 12 years and up as Basij militia members to be used in checkpoints in big cities like Tehran. The goal is that if they are being bombed from above by Israeli drones, then they could claim that children are killed by Israeli bombs. They can also save the main IRGC bodies from being killed. By doing this, they win both ways.
“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.
Obviously, it is unethical. It is a war crime. It is a violation of the Child Soldier Convention. Human Rights Watch proclaimed, “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 office of the U.N. Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict states that “no matter their role, [children] associated with parties to conflict are exposed to acute levels of violence.”
Counter-terror expert Noor Dahri wrote on X that the fact that Jaafari was killed while present at an IRGC checkpoint “raises serious concerns about the use of minors in wartime security roles. Sending children into conflict zones, where they risk being killed, is then framed by the authorities as martyrdom in service of Velayat e Faqih, a doctrine that, in the view of its supporters, is linked to preparing the path for the coming of the mahdi,” or Shia messiah.
Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli scholar of Arab culture, stressed that the Iranian regime’s supporters believe that the mahdi will come when there is chaos in the world. He argues that Iran’s recent actions over the past month are designed to bring about the coming of the mahdi. For the Iranian regime, recruiting children into the IRGC and Basij is merely the latest action designed to help bring this about.
According to Human Rights Watch, “Iran has for years enlisted children under 18 in the Basij force, and the IRGC sent Afghan immigrant children living in Iran as child soldiers to support the Assad government during the civil war in Syria. Human Rights Watch documented that boys as young as 14 were killed in combat. According to Iranian officials, in the 1980s, authorities recruited hundreds of thousands of children to fight in the Iran-Iraq war, with tens of thousands killed.”
Thirteen-year-old recruit Marhamat Balazadeh was sent to the frontlines and killed in 1984. The Iranian regime turned him into an icon to recruit other child soldiers. He was from a South Azerbaijani family in Chaygermi, a village near the Azerbaijani border in the Ardabil Province.
In the 1980s, thousands of these children—ranging from ages 12, 13, 14 and 15—were sent to the front lines, particularly trained to run over landmines and get killed. This way, mines would explode, and that would open a path for Iranian soldiers to attack Iraq.
An estimated 10,000 children from the South Azerbaijani provinces alone were killed at the front line in the war against Iraq. They were lured by being given “keys to paradise.” Recruited from schools, they were sent to the frontlines knowing that they would be killed running over landmines. Schoolchildren from villages, especially from low-income families, were tempted by the martyrdom ideology and the promise of entering paradise.
According to Human Rights Watch, “The U.N. Security Council has “strongly condemned” child recruitment and established a reporting system, led by the secretary-general, that considers it a “grave violation” against children. The Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits recruitment of children under 15. An Optional Protocol to the Convention, which Iran signed but has not ratified, provides that 18 is the minimum age for direct participation in hostilities. Iran is bound by customary international law, which provides that recruitment of children under age 15 is a war crime.”
Van Esveld pointed out that “the officials involved in this reprehensible policy are putting children at risk of serious and irreversible harm and themselves at risk of criminal liability. Senior leaders who fail to put a stop to this can make no claim to care for Iran’s children.”
It is past time that the international community, instead of looking the other way, should be working with international organizations to put the clerical leadership of Iran and IRGC commanders on trial for recruiting child soldiers.
