A video posted to Telegram in June 2026 appears to show a Rapid Support Forces commander in Sudan welcoming new recruits, some of whom appear to be children.
The video highlights a grim reality of Sudan’s civil war, now in its fourth year.
Both sides are recruiting children, posting the evidence themselves, and celebrating it with hashtags.
When Scripps News searched the term “Lion Cubs” on TikTok, it found accounts — some with thousands of followers — glorifying underage boys as fighters in a conflict already defined by atrocities.
Scripps News flagged the accounts to TikTok. The company removed them, saying the accounts violated its community standards.
The United Nations recently warned that a city of half a million people, El Obeid, may be next in line for the kind of mass violence that killed more than 6,000 people in three days when the RSF seized El Fasher in 2025. The secretary general's message was direct: we must not allow those horrors to be repeated.
To better understand what children in Sudan are experiencing, Scripps News spoke with Francisco Lanino, Save the Children’s deputy country director.
The conditions producing child soldiers, Lanino said, are the same conditions producing mass starvation. When the conflict began, 90% of Sudan's schools shut down. Half remain closed. Teachers who stayed earn salaries so low that they cannot feed their own families. In some villages, he said, up to 60% of children are suffering from severe malnutrition.
"If you don't have access to a school system in which you will be able to read and write," Lanino said, children become far more susceptible to recruitment. To militarization. The pipeline from empty classroom to armed faction, he suggested, is shorter than the world wants to believe.
