It’s summer camp season, when kids across America roast marshmallows and compete in games of color war.

But in Lebanon, camps run by Iran-backed Hezbollah are preparing children for holy war instead.

Every summer, the terror group’s Imam al-Mahdi Scout camps indoctrinate Shiite youth — and even offer paramilitary training to older members.

Scores of former Mahdi Scouts have joined Hezbollah’s ranks.

And as Israel and Lebanon continue negotiations after their recent agreement to disarm Hezbollah, this key terrorist recruitment pipeline can only undermine the slim chance for peace.    

The Imam al-Mahdi Scouts, established in the mid-1980s and recognized by the Lebanese government in 1992, pledge to advance Wilayat al Fiqih, or the “guardianship of the jurist” — that is, the teachings of Iran’s supreme leader.

Primarily underwritten by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the group now boasts 75,000 registered male and female scouts.

This summer, the youngest Mahdi Scouts are busy with tug-of-war, soccer games and cooking potatoes in campfires, the group’s website explains.

Tween members are performing community service, clearing rubble from villages and preparing care packages for Shiite children displaced by the latest war Hezbollah launched against Israel.

But older scouts have a different, decidedly less benign schedule.

In July, teenagers and counselors took a field trip to Iran to attend the funeral of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, who was killed on the first day of the Iran war by an Israeli airstrike.

When scouts turn 16, they’re offered “literacy training” — a course in the basics of weaponry.

Over the summer, the teenage scouts receive more intensive training in different types of armaments.

Early on, campers are taught the values of “resistance” and “sacrifice.”

In July, the group organized a ceremony to honor former scouts who graduated to join Hezbollah — and were killed while fighting Israel.

An article on the group’s website reported that the celebration highlighted these terrorists’ “journey in scouting . . . which culminated in martyrdom.” 

And while there’s no current tally of its “martyrs,” the Mahdi Scouts’ own publications indicate that more than 120 of them were killed in action through 2006, in its earliest years of operation.

Ideological indoctrination starts early, judging by the monthly age-appropriate, professional-grade print and online magazines the group produces for its cadres.

Preschoolers, for example, can enjoy a pencil maze that challenges them to help a rabbit find its way through a labyrinth of mines planted by Israeli “occupation soldiers,” or they can collect stickers of Kalashnikovs, grenades and children waving Hezbollah flags.

Older kids can read about the centrality of martyrdom, illustrated by pictures of Hezbollah caskets at funerals.        

The education program appears to be working: In October 2025, the Mahdi Scouts organized a commemoration for former Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an IDF airstrike in September 2024.

The event, held at a 50,000-seat stadium in Beirut, may have been the largest Scout Jamboree ever — Hezbollah media claimed 74,000 scouts attended.    

Even if the numbers were exaggerated, it was an impressive turnout — and a message that, despite sustaining substantial losses in its war against Israel, Hezbollah still has recruits waiting to join the fight.

This does not bode well for peace.

Over the past year, President Donald Trump has pushed to broker a deal between Jerusalem and Beirut that will disarm Hezbollah.

Washington is working closely with the Lebanese government to try to limit Iranian funding for its terror catspaw.

But there’s a missing piece in the US strategy: reforming the terrorist ideology that the Mahdi Scouts put on such clear display.  

It will take time, nerve and political will for the weak and fractious Lebanese state to supplant Hezbollah institutions in predominantly Shiite areas.

In the meantime, just as Beirut has declared Hezbollah’s weapons illegal, it must ban the Mahdi Scouts to start dismantling the aspiring-martyr pipeline.

The group must also be stripped of its international legitimacy: For decades, the Mahdi Scouts have been a member organization of the Lebanese Scouting Federation.

Like Scouting America — formerly the Boy Scouts — the Lebanese Federation is a constituent member of World Scouting, the scout movement’s global organization.

Even an arms’-length affiliation with Scouting’s official body is an embarrassment to scouts worldwide.

Finally, the Trump administration should trigger sanctions against the Mahdi Scouts by designating it as a foreign terrorist organization or as an entity that illicitly undermines Lebanon’s sovereignty and stability.

After all, the group openly declares allegiance to Iran’s supreme leader rather than to Lebanon, and its ideological agenda threatens Beirut’s aspirations for full sovereignty.

If Trump is serious about promoting Israel-Lebanon peace, he should target Hezbollah’s farm team.

David Schenker is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.