In his film Turtles Can Fly, Bahman Ghobadi presents a stark picture of Iraqi Kurdish children and their struggles to survive around the time of the US-led invasion of 2003. Towards the end of the film a group of boys head off to the nearby town to obtain guns and then set these up on the roof of their school as defence against a possible military attack. This is not recruitment in the conventional sense but the self-mobilisation of a group of children under the leadership of a 13-yearold. Ghobadi's film also shows us the rape by Iraqi soldiers of a young girl and her subsequent suicide, the wretched living conditions in a makeshift displacement camp, and large numbers of children engaged in the manual defusing of landmines for meagre pennies. Amid these horrors, the children's efforts to arm themselves are hardly shocking. Indeed, given the dangers and deprivation, such action appears tragically reasonable: an expression of young people's determination to survive against considerable odds in a setting where adults have failed in their duty to protect.

Often absent from the burgeoning literature and debate on children's involvement in military action and political violence is careful attention to the processes through which mobilisation occurs. The appalling cases where children are abducted and compelled to take part in acts of brutality are well known. Yet not all rebel groups and government forces operate in the same manner in pursuing the recruitment of underage personnel. It would be misleading to consider the actions of a group such as the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda – notorious for its abduction and brutal initiation of children – as typical.