At just 17 years old, Ibrahim can expertly handle a Kalashnikov rifle. Unlike formally enlisted troops in Yemeni government-aligned forces, he fights alongside his older brother and male cousins as an informal volunteer, driven by a single goal: defending his home from advancing Houthi forces. “When the Houthis approached our village, dozens of local residents picked up personal weapons to push back, and I was among them,” he explained in an interview with Middle East Eye. Grabbing his father’s stored rifle, Ibrahim joined a local resistance cell aligned with official government forces. Growing up in Yemen, firearm familiarity came early: “We’ve kept a Kalashnikov in our home for years, and I’ve fired it at weddings and community gatherings before, so I knew how to use it,” he said. For Ibrahim, this fight is temporary. He has no ambition for a long-term military career, and plans to lay down his arms once his village is retaken to resume his studies, with the dream of one day working as an automotive engineer.
Ibrahim’s story is far from unique. Since the latest outbreak of large-scale fighting between Houthi rebels and Yemeni government forces, the widespread use of child soldiers has reemerged as a devastating feature of the country’s decade-long conflict, with both major warring parties trading accusations of underage recruitment to front lines and support roles. Neither side publicly acknowledges recruiting minors, but independent verification from the United Nations, international media, and regional human rights groups has confirmed the practice persists on both sides of the conflict.
A 2025 report from the UN Secretary-General on children and armed conflict documented 564 verified cases of child recruitment and deployment in Yemen between 2021 and 2023. Of these confirmed cases, 345 were linked to Houthi forces, while 210 were attributed to Yemeni national armed forces and their affiliated armed groups. The remaining small number of cases were traced to unidentified actors and the Yemen-based affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The UN confirmed the children recruited ranged in age from 8 to 17 years old. Of the total, 293 were deployed directly to combat roles, while 187 served in support positions including checkpoint guards, informants, and military drivers. Twenty-seven of the children sent into active combat were younger than 15 years old.
Ahmed, Ibrahim’s 41-year-old cousin who fights alongside him, pushed back against claims that the teen serves on the front lines. He explained Ibrahim only carries out support duties behind frontline troops, a role suited to his current skills and physical size. “Frontline combat demands experience that most teenagers don’t have; it’s not a role anyone can step into,” Ahmed told Middle East Eye. “Even so, fighters like Ibrahim provide critical backup for our main forces, and that support makes a real difference when circumstances are this desperate.”
Recent cases of underage participation have drawn international attention. Last month, as fighting intensified around the embattled city of Taiz, the BBC broadcast an interview with a 16-year-old fighter aligned with government forces who claimed he had taken part in active frontline combat. In response to the report, Colonel Abdul Basit al-Bahr, deputy head of the Moral Guidance Department at the Taiz Axis Command, told Middle East Eye the teenager was only accompanying his father and was never enlisted as a combatant for government forces. “Our armed forces have an explicit policy banning child recruitment; it is strictly forbidden to accept children into our ranks or push them into military operations,” al-Bahr said. He did, however, acknowledge that government forces regularly encounter children on battlefields, some as young as 10 years old. “We follow appropriate legal and humanitarian protocols for these children, and refer them to relevant authorities to resolve their situations in line with Yemeni law,” he added, noting that minors captured while fighting alongside Houthi forces are treated as vulnerable children rather than adult enemy combatants.
Independent Yemeni human rights group SAM Organisation for Rights and Liberties has documented an even larger scale of recruitment: the group recorded 11,310 cases of child recruitment across Yemen between 2014, when the current conflict escalated, and February 2023. More than half of those children – 6,269 – were between 8 and 11 years old, an age group developmentally unprepared for any form of conflict participation.
SAM president Tawfeeq al-Homaidi explained that the years-long economic collapse sparked by ongoing war has created fertile ground for armed groups to exploit vulnerable children and their families. “When a family loses all income, when the breadwinner stops getting paid, when a child is forced out of school because the conflict has closed education facilities, the small sum of cash, bag of food, or monthly stipend an armed group offers stops being a choice – it becomes a matter of basic survival for the whole family,” al-Homaidi said. In a September 2026 joint statement signed by 266 Yemeni human rights and civil society organizations, the Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedom condemned the Houthi movement for weaponizing extreme economic hardship to force minors onto the battlefield. “Children have borne the worst of these violations: forced recruitment, deployment to active battlefields, and exploitation of their needs and their families’ socioeconomic desperation through ideological and military indoctrination,” the statement read.
Yet al-Homaidi cautioned against reducing child recruitment solely to poverty, noting a wider range of driving factors. “Ideological mobilization, exploitation of school and summer camp programs, social and tribal pressure, the lure of status, personal weapons, and steady pay, interrupted schooling, and in some cases direct physical coercion – all of these play a role,” he explained. A recent Al Jazeera English investigation from Houthi-controlled northern Yemen revealed how armed groups lure children with tangible incentives: promises of a personal Kalashnikov rifle, a month of military training, and a monthly stipend equal to roughly $94 USD.
Al-Homaidi added that recent UN briefings on Yemen have repeatedly raised urgent alarms about Houthi-run summer camps, where thousands of children are exposed to military training and sectarian ideological indoctrination ahead of deployment. While Houthi forces have faced the majority of international scrutiny for the practice, al-Homaidi stressed that child recruitment is not limited to Houthi-held territory. “The UN has documented cases among government forces and their affiliated armed groups as well, even if the numbers are far smaller, and coercion is far less common,” he said.
As of 2026, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates more than 22 million Yemenis – nearly two-thirds of the country’s population – require urgent humanitarian assistance and protection, including 5.2 million people internally displaced by years of fighting. The latest resurgence of full-scale conflict has only created new openings for armed groups to draw children into fighting, whether through formal enlistment, informal local resistance cells, family pressure, or the overwhelming force of economic desperation. Under UN definitions, child recruitment extends far beyond formal military enlistment, encompassing any use of minors in combat or support military roles.
For Ibrahim, however, these formal definitions mean little. He does not see himself as a child soldier; he sees himself as a young Yemeni defending his home. “I’m here to take back our village,” he says. For the sake of Yemen’s children and the country’s future, human rights advocates warn, ending this cycle of exploitation will require both a ceasefire to end ongoing fighting and coordinated international action to address the economic collapse and systemic vulnerability that drive recruitment. (Note: All names of minors featured in this report have been changed at the request of sources to protect their safety.)