(Al Jazeera Media Network) Eight underage rebel recruits were killed last week after the Colombian government launched a fresh military offensive against a prominent armed group, according to President Gustavo Petro.
The news comes amid soaring child recruitment by Colombia’s armed groups in recent years and has ignited a debate over whether forced recruits can be protected on the battlefield.
In a Monday post on social media platform X, Petro confirmed that seven adolescents were killed in a government bombing campaign in the southern Guaviare department on November 10.
Another minor was killed three days later in a government offensive in the eastern department of Arauca.
Those deaths bring the number of teenage fatalities to at least 12 in under two months.
“All of them were victims of forced recruitment by criminals who have dragged them into hostilities and deprived them of protection,” Petro, himself a former rebel, wrote in his post.
But the question of how to protect child recruits is a controversial one in Colombia, where armed actors have increasingly sought to exploit minors.
For more than six decades, an armed conflict has roiled Colombia, pitting government forces against right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing rebels and criminal groups.
Official government statistics suggest that those groups have sought to grow their ranks by appealing to people under the age of 18 — and in some cases, coercing them into work.
According to the government, the number of child recruits has increased by 1,000% from 2021 to 2024.
That uptick was echoed in a June report from the United Nations. It determined that, from 2022 to 2024, there were 474 confirmed cases of armed groups using or recruiting minors.
In the first quarter of 2025, the office received allegations of a further 118 child recruits.
Victims, the report added, were as young as nine years old. Many were from Colombia’s Indigenous communities.
The latest casualties come as Petro’s government intensifies its counterinsurgency against the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), a dissident group that splintered off from the now-demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
