The war in Yemen is being broadcast on video streams in real time, and among the faces staring back from the battlefield are those of children — some impossibly young. In a war fought as much with propaganda as with weapons, every piece of information demands scrutiny. Yet even through the fog of propaganda, by both sides, the visual evidence of child soldiers is stark. On battered Toyota pickup trucks carrying men towards the frontlines, many intoxicated on qat, there are children. Banners hung across northern Yemen display the faces of fallen Houthi fighters being carried in funeral convoys—among them young boys posing with the solemnity of grown men. Houthi prisoners of war, captured by pro-government forces, have recounted being recruited at young ages and sent to the front, revealing an indoctrination apparatus powerful enough to divide families across all levels of Yemeni society.

The resumption of war in Yemen forces us to confront a long-simmering crisis decades in the making, but deadliest in the last: a childhood systemically sacrificed and fed to the machinery of Yemen’s wars.

A War Drafted on Lost Childhood

“We have no children in Yemen. None. A Yemeni is born a man—great in his stance, courage, and pride. We do not have children.”^[1]

The use of children in warfare in Yemen has long been documented by rights organizations. Years of research, warnings, and international petitions have attempted to both curb and shed light on a growing crisis, with each of the warring parties having signed pledges to put a stop to the practice,^[2] including the Houthi group (Ansar Allah) in 2022, whose recruitment and deployment of child soldiers is most pervasive.

Monitoring and reporting remain fraught with data gaps, politicized reporting and access constraints, while available figures likely understate the scope and scale of the problem. Figures provided by local civil society actors—such as SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties, which reported over 11,000 cases between 2014 and 2021—indicate the scale of the problem, though the complex and politicized reporting landscape means that figures on child soldiers in Yemen should be interpreted with caution. In one representative sample, a UN task force verified 861 cases of child recruitment across 2019 and 2020 (789 boys and 72 girls), attributing 70 percent of those violations to the Houthis. Since 2023, international organizations have warned of an increase in conscription, driven by the war on Gaza and the associated intensification of mobilization efforts, which tapped into longstanding Yemeni solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Today, the indoctrination and enlistment of children in the North operate under a highly institutionalized system. Exploiting worsening poverty, promises of food aid, and often resorting to direct coercion, Yemeni families are pressured to surrender their children through two main pathways: a highly dogmatized school system that treats education as an extension of the war; and an increasing reliance on summer camps. Framed as programs that build national and moral identity, these camps serve as recruitment pipelines that shape youth ideologically to confront perceived enemies. More than one million children passed through these camps in Houthi-controlled territories during 2025 alone. Once recruited, Yemeni children are used in both active combat operations and support roles, sent to the front lines or to man checkpoints, carry ammunition, help with the wounded, conduct surveillance, plant explosives, or provide domestic service to commanders. While the large majority of children recruited are young boys, girls aged 13 to 17 have also been found in the Zainabiyyat, the Houthis’ all-female security and ideological enforcement apparatus, whose roles include inspecting women and homes and overseeing women held in detention facilities.

A Child on Every Frontline

The systemic socialization of children into an ideology that glorifies martyrdom and warfare in areas under Houthi control constitutes one of the darkest chapters in Yemen’s conflict. But the conscription of minors is neither new nor exclusive to the Houthis. Under President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni military faced international backlash and threats of withdrawal of military aid for using minors in state ranks, especially during the Sa’ada Wars against the Houthis. In 2011, Human Rights Watch documented 14- and 15-year-old soldiers in Sana’a serving under General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar’s First Armored Division, which had defected from Saleh’s regime to align with and protect anti-regime protesters.

A Sana’a Center study from 2024 found that children were also recruited by government-aligned forces on the frontlines of Marib and Shabwa. Although the Yemeni government, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE backers have tried to project an image of military professionalization and adherence to international standards during the conflict, systemic recruitment of child soldiers remains commonplace. Pressure to fill manpower, weak accountability, and decentralized local leadership have facilitated the practice across coalition-backed forces. Financial incentives—including salaries reaching 1,000 Saudi riyals (approximately $266 USD) per month — make enlistment particularly lucrative in a war-torn economy where many Yemeni families are struggling to make ends meet or are going hungry. Beyond financial incentives, soldiers are given shelter, daily meals, and rations of cigarettes and qat, the latter of which has been a defining feature of this war, and one that hasn’t spared children. Amid growing PTSD, war fatigue, and lack of safe recreational opportunities, qat consumption among children is today more widespread, shattering long-standing taboos in Yemen.

Recruits have also been known to bypass age limits by obtaining fraudulent IDs with inauthentic birth certificates—a deeply entrenched practice in Yemen. Armed groups use these official documents to claim legal compliance, making the reporting of children’s ages very difficult while obscuring the true scale of recruitment.

Understanding the persistence of the practice also requires looking beyond recruitment patterns to the broader social and psychological factors that make Yemeni children vulnerable to it, including deeply embedded notions of honor, masculinity, and social standing that are weaponized to turn impressionable young boys into willing combatants.

Costs That Will Outlast the War

Documenting the perpetrators and methods used behind child recruitment in Yemen is essential for building potential legal cases in the future and renewing pressure to curb the practice. Instead, the tragedy of child soldiers in Yemen is primarily being weaponized to discredit the adversary, reducing visibly traumatized children to props for public outrage. The truth is the militarization of children in Yemen signals a much broader failure, which goes beyond violations of international humanitarian law and potential war crimes. For Yemeni children, the very notion of childhood is being lost. In areas affected by the current conflict, schools are being closed, thousands are being displaced, breadwinners are dying on the front lines, and families are being pushed further into destitution. All of this creates an environment ripe for the recruitment of yet more children in an unforgiving war.

Mobilization is already accelerating. Reports from Sana’a’s education sector indicate that the Houthis have imposed conscription quotas on secondary school principals, requiring them to provide a set number of students for service. The longer the struggle for Yemen continues, the more is stolen from its youth. Those born in 2015, now at the impressionable age of 11, have known only war. The return of conflict exposes how short-sighted international efforts focused on securitization and military campaigns have overlooked one of the country’s most consequential long-term challenges —its children. For pragmatists wrestling with how to stabilize the region, there is a bitter irony in preaching security and stability in Yemen while abandoning a young and vulnerable population, living on a strategic geopolitical fault line, to the brutal ecosystem of war.

This commentary is part of a series of publications produced by the Sana’a Center and funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Reimagining Yemen’s Peace in the Regional Landscape program. The series seeks to bolster peacebuilding efforts in Yemen by strategically examining the country’s security and economic ties with the broader Gulf and Red Sea region.