Issue No. 122

A brief history of Sudan's child soldiers

In early 1987, the commander of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), John Garang, is reported to have issued a radio order, instructing his field officers to gather children to be dispatched to Ethiopia for military training. Garang's command conveyed the rebels' institutionalisation of a well-established practice of child soldiering; a dynamic that has been reproduced by virtually every major armed actor in Sudan-- and later South Sudan-- since independence. Today, as war has continued to ravage and metastasise across Sudan, few communities and children have been left untouched by the ruinous violence.

The nature of the Sudanese state has long established the country's centre at war with its peripheries, with a predatory, extractive and mercenary-driven style of frontier capitalist governance dating back centuries. These margins-- be it Darfur or modern-day South Sudan-- have been plundered as reservoirs of gold and oil, as well as sites of brutal state-sponsored violence mobilised against restive communities. More often than not, child military recruitment has been an embedded feature of said violence, reproduced in different ways across state and non-state actors, but often regarded as a compliant, cheap, and expendable resource. And, in turn, children-- predominantly boys, but also girls in roles ranging from domestic servitude to intelligence-gathering and forced marriage-- have been documented serving in a range of military roles in conflict, as well as spying, ferrying messages, or portering.

The Anyanya insurgency from 1955 onwards -- when southern soldiers rebelled against the Arabisation policies of Khartoum, predating formal independence by a matter of months—marked the first documented use of child soldiers in a modern Sudanese conflict. The subsequent First Civil War drew children into a number of roles, particularly following the destruction of southern civil society by Khartoum's forced Arabisation and Islamisation campaigns. Remote rural communities with no alternative pathways for youth and no state institutions to anchor children in civilian life meant that teenagers and children were incorporated into the Anyanya's loose coalition of guerrilla cells. An uneasy eleven years of peace followed the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, before the Second Civil War resumed in 1983 with greater ferocity.

The SPLA/M had a particularly chequered history with child soldiers in the 20th century, with the so-called 'Red Army' representing the most documented child soldier formation. Recruitment was often deliberately obscured, with the rebel movement promising schooling to prise children from their villages before being dispatched to the Bonga Revolutionary War Institute. And by the mid-1980s, the SPLA had begun arranging for boys to arrive at their military bases on the Ethiopian border, many linked to the sprawling refugee camps at Panyido, Sarapam, Itang, Dimma, and Bilpam, whose management Addis Ababa had effectively delegated to the rebel movement. In the Derg period, South Sudanese children were reported to have been subcontracted to the SPLA/M-allied Ethiopian army, whilst other young refugees were transported to Cuba for military training. Even after pledges from the SPLA/M in the 2000s that the practice would be discontinued, child soldiering endured. And the movement's successors in Juba similarly deployed child recruitment during and after South Sudan's own catastrophic civil war from 2013 to 2018.

Meanwhile, Omar al-Bashir's government interactions with child soldiers were rather different, though Khartoum can hardly be excused. Most prominent was the successive formation of parallel security structures as a means to coup-proof the regime, beginning with the Popular Defence Forces in 1989, which blended military instruction with Islamist indoctrination. Though a nominal minimum age of 16 existed — itself below the international legal standard — it was routinely ignored in practice. And in the brutal campaigns against the nation's peripheries, be it the Nuba in the 1990s or indigenous Darfurians in the 2000s, children and young adults were coerced and co-opted into service. For instance, the armed Baggara fighters known as the Murahaleen, deployed against Dinka communities in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, and the various southern proxy militias maintained through the 1990s, all incorporated child combatants. And in Khartoum itself, the government rounded up hundreds of displaced southern and Nuba children, dispatching them to camps that functioned as reservoirs for military conscription.

Most prominent, of course, was that the Janjaweed-- the 'devils on horseback'-- drawn from the transnational Sahelian tribes, who laid waste to Darfur in the early 2000s with the endorsement of Khartoum. As with their progeny, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Janjaweed's recruitment of child soldiers predominantly relied upon the faza'a tradition, a pre-Islamic tribal mobilisation custom used by Sahelian Arab communities. Through it, tribal leaders are able to call on their members to take up arms to counter threats or to pursue a perceived collective tribal interest. Such a practice continues to this day, with the RSF and its allied Arab militias diffusing responsibility for child mobilisation across a network of sheikhs and local power-brokers. As the RSF were absorbed into the formal security architecture of the state in the 2010s, the use of children in conflict persisted, with the paramilitaries purportedly deploying them in the Yemeni civil war as well.

The post-2019 transition did little to disrupt these dynamics. Instead, the fragmentation of authority between rival military centres entrenched parallel systems of mobilisation, with few meaningful constraints on recruitment practices, including of minors. And today, the use of child soldiers in the internationalised civil war is at its most acute in decades, whilst the devastation of Sudan is driving a multi-faceted child protection crisis. In much of the country, the social fabric has been badly torn, ripped by yet more waves of violence, displacement, and ethnic targeting. Among other issues, the rapid impoverishment of Sudan alongside the collapse of its educational system has left girls particularly vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence.

More broadly, three structural factors speak to the persistence of child soldiering in Sudan. The first — particularly acute in the current conflict — is the systematic devastation of institutions, be it schools, family and community structures, or agricultural economies. With an estimated 17 million children out of school by mid-2025, displacement and the risk of coercion into state or non-state armed groups have skyrocketed. The second is the persistent impunity for violations of international humanitarian law, with neither the Sudanese army, the RSF, nor the litany of armed groups in the country facing any prosecution for their use of child soldiers. The third is the wielding of customary frameworks, including faza'a, by armed forces to distribute accountability so widely that it becomes legally impossible to locate.

While both the RSF and the Sudanese army have been documented deploying child soldiers, the contours of this conflict — albeit on a broader scale — follow past trajectories, with the paramilitaries estimated to have between 8,000 and 10,000 minors in their ranks. Faza'a mobilisation, violent coercion, and the weaponisation of famine, with food reported to have been withheld in RSF-controlled areas to force enlistment, operate simultaneously. In communities where the civilian economy has been entirely destroyed, some families have been reduced to pushing their children toward recruitment themselves, experiencing it as the only available employment, illustrating how enlistment can blur the line between coercion and constrained choice. In turn, according to UN Special Rapporteur Siobhán Mullally, over 600 paramilitary child soldiers were killed or injured fighting in Khartoum in just August 2023 alone.

In the mid-2010s, the Sudanese government offered nominal moves towards greater compliance with international regulations, signing onto a UN Action Plan in 2016 and opening up verification for UNICEF two years later in army facilities. Yet at the moment of crisis, the predatory nature of the state soon returned. And at the onset of the war in 2023, the Sudanese army, with its infantry corps gutted by the rebellion of the RSF, mobilised children as well, caught up in their 'volunteer' brigades of allied militias that operate with near-total impunity, including the Islamist Jihadist Al-Baraa bin Malik Brigade. In 2024, videos emerged of the Brigade conscripting and training children in military fatigues in River Nile State.

What is a newer phenomenon, however, and is particularly concerning, is the veneration of young boys-- widely referred to as 'lion cubs'-- as child soldiers across TikTok, Facebook, and X. In one infamous video, a young teenager bearing an assault rifle under the RSF command is seen celebrating the capture of a Sudanese army base in Babanusa in West Kordofan. The glorification of children as warriors, with many of these videos gathering millions of views, seeks to both recruit others and to normalise the practice. The SAF has been similarly implicated, with a Bellingcat-documented video showing a young boy in an army uniform appearing in an orchestrated setting alongside Sudan's Information Minister, Khaled Al-Aiser; child soldiering endorsed, on camera.

The psychological toll on children caught in these structures is naturally severe, with many carrying the consequences of early militarisation for decades. And the children holding weapons in Darfur, Kordofan, Khartoum and beyond today did not arrive through misfortune alone, but rather through decades-old legal, socio-economic and military structures. For far too many Sudanese children, war has not interrupted childhood—it has defined it.

​The Horn Edition Team