Known across social media platforms as “lion cubs” (“shibli” in Arabic), child soldiers have become a recruitment tool for both sides in Sudan’s civil war in violation of international law.
“They’ve become famous, almost equivalent to Disney child stars in the U.S., where everybody knows their name,” analyst Mia Bloom recently told the British open-source investigative cooperative Bellingcat.
Bloom, a professor of communication and Middle East studies at Georgia State University, is a leading expert on armed groups’ exploitation and recruitment of children. She added that child soldiers become powerful tools for recruiting adults and young people into armed groups.
Under the international agreement known as the Paris Principles, a child soldier is anyone under 18 recruited or used by a military or armed group “in any capacity.” The children need not be involved in combat to be considered a soldier. Sudan is a signatory to the Paris Principles.
A joint investigation by Bellingcat and Sudan’s Radio Dabanga examined 12 cases in which child soldiers have posted content on TikTok in violation of the company’s own policies. The accounts studied were geolocated to sites held by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
On the SAF side, a young boy whose TikTok account had more than 700,000 followers and received millions of views across multiple videos, recited a poem mocking RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. The boy appeared with Darfur governor and SAF militia leader Minni Minnawi and called for a united Sudan from a raised platform surrounded by soldiers.
Although that boy is never shown in combat, he frequently wears a uniform with SAF insignia.
In another, RSF commander Salih al-Foti appeared in a video with a young boy on his shoulders celebrating the conquest of the SAF’s 22nd Division base in West Kordofan. An RSF spokesman dismissed the video as the commander’s son joining him after the battle.
In another RSF-related video posted in January, another child, described as a young teenager, is shown at the same location. “I see people on the [social] media saying that I will die. “For the person who dies, it’s as if he has paid his debt,” he said.
The video was viewed more than 1.6 million times before questions from Bellingcat prompted TikTok to take it down.
The SAF and the RSF deny recruiting children to fight. However, analysts told Bellingcat and Radio Dabanga that the evidence suggests otherwise.
United Nations investigations in 2023 and 2024 found child soldiers being recruited on both sides of the war.
U.N. reports found that the RSF “systematically recruited and used children in hostilities.” The paramilitary used food shortages, displacement and other hardships to bring poor or isolated children into its combat ranks and used them to staff checkpoints and produce social media content. Recruiting child soldiers with food and promises of safety amounts to contemporary slavery under international law.
“The deteriorating humanitarian situation and lack of access to food and other basic services make children, especially unaccompanied and separated children on the streets, easy targets for recruitment by armed groups,” Siobhán Mullally, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, wrote in her 2023 report.
The SAF also was accused of supporting the mobilization of youth groups as part of the Army’s call for help. Online videos showed SAF officers training children who later turned up at checkpoints in SAF-controlled areas.
Analysts told Bellingcat and Radio Dabanga that the SAF and RSF do not need to recruit child soldiers directly. Videos such as those on TikTok praising children as “lion cubs” and celebrating their activity in the war do that work for them.
“The message becomes: ‘Look how famous he got by doing that — maybe if I join the movement, I can also be famous,’” Bloom said.