Somalia report details ongoing child recruitment and abuse in conflict

Yusuf Ali is 34 now, living in Mogadishu with the same conflict-era reminders that shaped his childhood. He says his life was pulled into Somalia’s mid-2000s fighting, when Mogadishu was engulfed by the rise of the Union of Islamic Courts and then the Ethiopian military intervention against Islamist forces, leaving him to carry the war long after the front lines moved.

That long afterlife is now spelled out in a 2026 United Nations report on children and armed conflict in Somalia, which covered Oct. 1, 2021 to Dec. 31, 2024 and was the seventh such report on the country. It documented six grave violations against children: recruitment and use as soldiers, killing and maiming, sexual violence, attacks on schools and hospitals, abduction, and denial of humanitarian access. The UN’s Somalia child-protection page says the majority of those violations were committed by Al-Shabaab.

The abuse is not confined to the past. The U.S. Department of Labor said Somalia made only minimal advancement in 2024 against the worst forms of child labor because federal and state security forces continued to recruit and use children in armed conflict. Its findings said children formerly associated with armed groups were subjected to official and unofficial detention, and that there were at least four instances in Puntland involving capital punishment of such children. The report also said children in Somalia were being used not only as combatants, but in support roles as cooks, porters, informants and checkpoint staff.

Al-Shabaab remained central to the crisis. EUAA reporting said the UN Panel of Experts on Somalia found child recruitment and abduction patterns continued unchanged through September 2023 to August 2024, with children used as fighters, suicide bombers, guards, porters, communicators, informants and spies. Girls were also exposed to sexual exploitation and forced marriages. The U.S. Labor Department said UN reporting for 2024 indicated 768 children were recruited and used in armed conflict by Al-Shabaab, including some as young as 8.

The scale of the problem is amplified by Somalia’s demographics. UNICEF said about 53 percent of the country’s population was under 18 in 2024, making child protection a national emergency, not a side issue. In June 2025, the United Nations removed Somalia from its list of countries implicated in the recruitment and use of child soldiers, a formal milestone that did not erase the broader danger or the trauma carried by survivors.

For boys and girls who were demobilized on paper, the harder work begins afterward: schooling, family tracing, vocational training and psychosocial support. Yusuf Ali’s story shows how war reaches into adulthood, and how a country can move on administratively while leaving children to rebuild their lives alone.