Emirati, Israeli and far-right social media accounts coordinated a digital campaign falsely claiming that Christians were being killed by Islamists in Sudan, a new report has found.
Beam Reports, a Sudanese investigative platform that combats disinformation, said in its latest report on Wednesday that after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group seized control of el-Fasher in Darfur nearly a month ago, misleading content about the nature of events began to surface online in a “synchronised manner”.
The objectives of the coordinated campaign, Beam Reports stated, included shifting blame of atrocities away from the RSF, recasting Sudan’s war as a religious conflict to “evoke foreign sympathy”, and flooding the online space with fabricated content to confuse media coverage.
The RSF carried out mass killings and abuses as it stormed el-Fasher, some of which were documented by its own fighters and have been corroborated by satellite imagery.
Beam identified Amjad Taha, an Emirati analyst, as the architect of the campaign. He posted several claims about alleged Islamists in Sudan, which were then amplified by other accounts.
One claim alleged that Britain was about to grant citizenship to a “Sudanese jihadist” whilst “Christians are being slaughtered in Sudan and Nigeria by Islamist extremists”.
Taha added that Sudan’s army had “killed 2 million Christians, displaced 8 million, and raped 15,000 women, while leftists stay busy attacking the UAE… a nation where church bells ring freely”.
The investigation found that none of the numbers cited were supported by credible sources or verified reports.
Taha also claimed that a Sudanese army officer had “eaten a man’s heart after killing him and his children”. Again, no evidence was provided, but such claims were amplified by Emirati, Israeli and far-right accounts.
For several months, Taha has led the charge on social media to link Sudan’s armed forces with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in Gaza.
Under former President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Sudanese military was dominated by religious conservatives who retain some influence within the army.
However, Sudanese of various affiliations and beliefs have backed the SAF – despite its history of coups and military rule – against the RSF.
Earlier this year, in a column for British publication Jewish News, Taha described the SAF as “the Hamas of Africa”.
Middle East Eye reached out to Taha for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
False ‘Islamist violence’ claims
Beam found that several accounts took to social media to re-use images of RSF abuses against civilians in el-Fasher and frame them as “Islamist violence against Christians”.
One such example was American influencer Nima Yamini, who shared images from el-Fasher and claimed they showed “Christians slaughtered in Sudan – and no one talks about it because Israel isn’t involved to be blamed”.
Yamini said that massacres against Christians were so severe that you can “see blood from space”.
In reality, blood splatters seen from space were from areas of el-Fasher where the RSF were reported to have shot residents.
In a different post, far-right Polish politician Dominik Tarczynski shared a purported image of a mother and child in el-Fasher with the false caption: “Sudan: genocide of Christians by the Islamists.”
MEE reached out to Yamini and Tarczynski for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The vast majority of people in Sudan are Muslim (over 90 percent), and the war is not being fought along religious lines.
A United Nations fact-finding mission in September said it had received credible allegations of attacks on places of worship committed by both warring parties. That included RSF shelling churches in el-Fasher, and SAF shelling mosques and a church in Wad Madani and Khartoum.
The war erupted in April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between the SAF, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, spiralled into open conflict.
The violence was triggered by disagreements over plans to integrate the RSF into the regular army, but quickly evolved into a nationwide war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 13 million.
MEE reported in January 2024 that the UAE was supplying the RSF with weapons through a complex network of supply lines and alliances stretching across Libya, Chad, Uganda, and Somalia.
US intelligence agencies reported as recently as October that the UAE has increased its supply of Chinese drones and other weapon systems to the RSF, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
Since Sudan’s war began in April 2023, RSF fighters have been accused of widespread massacres and abuses, including a genocide elsewhere in Darfur. The SAF have also been accused of war crimes.
