Myanmar junta says 93 child soldiers already released, as it counters UN criticism

Myanmar’s ruling junta said on July 4 that it has already discharged 93 minors from military service, responding to a UN report in June accusing it and its allies of recruiting over 400 children, many in combat roles.

In a rare admission published in its mouthpiece newspaper, the junta said it conducted a verification process in 2024 that resulted in the discharge of 93 verified minors, who were also provided with financial assistance.

“To date, only 18 suspected minor cases remain pending verification,” a government-run committee said in a statement published in the Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper.

It is unclear when the 93 minors were released.

Myanmar’s military and the armed groups affiliated to it recruited 467 boys and 15 girls, including over 370 children used in combat roles in 2024, the UN Secretary-General’s report on Children and Armed Conflict said.

Anti-junta groups had also recruited children, the report said, although their number was far lower than that of the military.

Myanmar has been

in turmoil since a 2021 coup

that unseated an elected government led by

Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi,

causing widespread protests that morphed into a nationwide armed uprising against the powerful military.

Established ethnic armies and new armed groups formed in the wake of the coup have gained control over much of Myanmar’s borderlands, hemming the junta largely into the country’s central plains.

The struggling junta

in 2024 activated a mandatory military service law

, conscripting young people to replenish its depleted ranks after months of relentless fighting forced it to cede swathes of territory.

Nearly 3.5 million people were internally displaced in the war-torn country, with children accounting for over 33 per cent of that population in 2024, according to Unicef.

The largest proportion of child recruitment appears to have taken place in western Rakhine state, home to the minority Muslim Rohingya community, where the Myanmar military – along with two allies fighting there – enlisted 300 minors, according to the UN report.

Reuters reported in 2024 that children as young as 13 were fighting on the front line in Rakhine state, citing a UN official and two Rohingya fighters.

More than a million Rohingya driven out of Myanmar remain confined in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, where militant recruitment and violence surged in 2024. REUTERS