Child soldiers linked to Sudan’s warring factions have gained viral fame on TikTok, with their videos attracting millions of views.
A Bellingcat investigation has found that the young boys – widely referred to as “lion cubs” – have become celebrated figures of the rival groups that have been fighting for control of the country since 2023.
Many of the videos we reviewed show the children in military uniforms posing with fighters and senior officials from both sides of the conflict – the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). They are seen celebrating battlefield victories, delivering motivational speeches, and making violent threats. In some footage the children are armed.
Child soldier experts told Bellingcat that the visibility and popularity of this content, which portrays fighting as normal, celebrated and aspirational, could lead to the recruitment of more young people in the conflict.
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Bellingcat flagged 12 TikTok accounts that had each posted viral content of child soldiers through the platform’s internal reporting mechanism. After more than 48 hours without action, we emailed TikTok to request comment, providing links to the reported content. This was done to give TikTok a further opportunity to review and remove the accounts, in order to minimise the risk of amplification by reporting on it.
Following our inquiry, TikTok removed seven of the reported accounts. The remaining active accounts continue to host more than a dozen videos featuring child soldier content, which, according to TikTok’s own guidelines, breaches its content policies.
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Bellingcat geolocated multiple TikTok videos showing an RSF “lion cub” – who appears to be a young teenager – celebrating the capture of the 22nd infantry division SAF base in Babanusa, a city in West Kordofan, in early December 2025.
The videos, posted by pro-RSF TikTok accounts and viewed millions of times, show the child’s movements on the ground in the aftermath of the takeover. In the weeks that followed, the child’s TikTok account gained tens of thousands of followers and recent posts amassed hundreds of thousands of views.
In a TikTok video posted to the child’s account on Jan. 1, 2026, in response to social media comments, the child says: “I see people on the [social] media saying that I will die. The person who dies is as if he has paid his debt” This video received more than 1,6 million views.
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