Since late October, El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, has been in a state of extreme tension after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized control of the city following an 18-month siege. This was followed by the near-total breakdown of state institutions and the flight of thousands of residents, as the city’s streets turned into ruins marked by destruction, looting, and violence. Hospitals were crippled, markets deserted, and the only sounds left were gunfire and the cries of displaced civilians seeking safety.
As testimonies mounted of grave abuses committed by the RSF against civilians in and around El Fasher, and amid growing international condemnation and human-rights pressure, Marsad Beam detected a coordinated digital campaign on X (formerly Twitter) promoting claims that Islamist extremist groups had attacked Christian citizens in Sudan.
The campaign was driven by Emirati and Israeli accounts, as well as figures from Europe and the United States identified with the far right. Beam’s monitoring team observed these accounts posting about the situation in El Fasher in a synchronized manner—but in a narrative completely detached from reality. Their content advanced a clearly misleading storyline portraying events in the city as the result of attacks by Islamist extremists on Christians. This report outlines the objectives, composition, and deceptive content of that campaign.
Objectives of the Campaign
- Shift blame from the RSF to alleged Islamist groups.
- Recast Sudan’s crisis especially in El Fasher as a religious conflict to evoke foreign sympathy.
- Flood the online spaces with fabricated content to confuse media coverage.
- Use emotionally charged imagery to provoke outrage.
- Disseminate content via foreign accounts to amplify reach.
Engineering the Narrative: how was it built
Beam’s analysis identified the account “Amjad Taha”—an Emirati national who describes himself as a “Middle East strategic affairs expert”—as the architect of the campaign.
Beam had previously reported on a coordinated inauthentic network led by this same account that pushed similar narratives accusing the Sudanese army of targeting Christians.
This time, Taha and affiliated accounts worked to craft a different storyline: diverting international audiences’ attention away from RSF atrocities in El Fasher.
As violence escalated, Taha’s account began posting new claims about Islamist groups in Sudan—alleging, for example, that Britain was about to grant citizenship to a Sudanese jihadist “while Christians are being slaughtered in Sudan and Nigeria by Islamist extremists.”
He further claimed that the “Sudanese Islamic Army has killed two million Christians, displaced eight million, and raped 15,000 women, while leftists attack the UAE where church bells ring freely, with over 40 churches and peaceful Christian life.”
He added: “In the UAE, synagogues are safe and religions coexist.”
In a post he emphasized two central points: first, that in Sudan there are extremist Islamist groups targeting Christians, and second, that the UAE, by contrast, embodies tolerance and interfaith coexistence. Yet none of the numbers cited were supported by any credible sources or verified reports.
Subsequently he shifted focus to El Fasher. As soon as the RSF announced its control of the city, the account alleged that “Islamist Sudanese army officers under the Muslim Brotherhood” had “eaten a man’s heart after killing him and his children,” claiming they wore Turkish uniforms, used Turkish weapons and Iranian drones, and issued “6,000 passports to Hamas terrorists.”
No visual or documentary evidence was provided. Emirati and Israeli accounts amplified these claims, comparing events in Sudan to Gaza—asserting that “Hamas kills Israelis while Islamist groups in Sudan’s army kill Christians, all driven by religious motives.”
Marsad Beam found that some accounts that participated in the campaign reused images originally documenting RSF abuses against civilians in El Fasher, reframing them as evidence of “Islamist violence against Christians.”
For example, Nima Yamini posted photos from El Fasher with a video claiming they showed “Christians slaughtered in Sudan—and no one talks about it because Israel isn’t involved to be blamed.”
He went on to say that “the massacres by Islamic groups against Christians are so severe you can see the blood from space,” sharing satellite imagery as “proof.”
It’s worth noting that Similar statements against Nigeria were made by Donald Trump, accusing the Nigerian government of persecuting Christians—remarks denounced by Nigerian Senator Ali Ndume as “ignorant and misleading,” clarifying that violence in Nigeria affects both Muslims and Christians indiscriminately.
Dominik Tarczyński: The Far Right Joins In
Polish MEP Dominik Tarczyński shared one of El Fasher images, with the caption: “Sudan: genocide of Christians by the Islamists.” Amjad Taha and other campaign accounts re-posted it for amplification.
Tarczyński, a member of the European Parliament since 2020 from Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS), is known for his hard-line anti-migrant stance—especially against migrants from Muslim-majority countries—and has openly declared that Poland “will never accept Muslim refugees.” His statements have led observers to classify him among Europe’s far-right Islamophobic politicians.
Another key participant, Tommy Robinson—the controversial British founder of the English Defence League (EDL)—reposted an image of a woman and child beside a purported photo of an Israeli hostage, writing: “Different countries, same ideology caused this.”
Robinson is infamous for organizing anti-Muslim rallies and spreading Islamophobic content online. What links these accounts is not only anti-Islam sentiment but also unwavering support for Israel, reflected in the coordination with Israeli state-linked accounts such as Israel in Arabic that echoed the campaign’s messaging.
The “Islamist” RSF:
While the campaign painted the Sudanese army as Islamist extremists, some political and media that participated in the campaign simultaneously claimed that the RSF itself represents Islamist or Muslim Brotherhood elements—contradicting the RSF’s own propaganda, which brands the army as the “Islamist deep state.” that it’s trying to defeat.
A striking example came from Canadian Senator Leo Housakos, a member of the Conservative party who echoed the “Christian genocide” line but blamed the “Islamic RSF” rather than Islamist factions in the army—revealing internal inconsistencies within the disinformation campaign.
Housakos, known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, used the narrative to attack critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, saying: “Those who accused Israel of genocide are silent about what’s happening in Sudan.”
Debunking the Narrative
The accounts leading the campaign claim that the ongoing war in Sudan is a religious war targeting Christians. However, this narrative lacks any documented evidence and is not supported by recognized field or human-rights reports. Therefore, portraying the war as a “targeting of the Christian faith” constitutes a misleading of public opinion.
It is worth noting that human-rights reports have indicated that repeated attacks on houses of worship in Sudan during the current war have not been limited to any single religion, but have included both mosques and churches. The UN International Fact-Finding Mission documented incidents of mosque shelling in the city of El Fasher in North Darfur, in its report submitted to the Human Rights Council on 8 September. It stated that it had received credible allegations of similar attacks on other places of worship by both warring parties, including Rapid Support Forces’ shelling of churches in El Fasher, and the Sudanese Armed Forces’ shelling of mosques and a Baptist church in Wad Madani and Khartoum.
The report added: “These testimonies indicate that places of worship have become direct victims of military operations and armed conflict, reflecting the comprehensive nature of the violence that has affected civilians of various faiths, without clear religious discrimination.”
Images, Technology, and Deception
Similarly, Marsad Beam noted that the “visual evidence” used by the accounts active in this campaign was entirely misleading and taken from unrelated contexts. For example, the accounts circulated an image of a woman holding her child while the shadows of rifles appear in the background, which spread on the basis that it documented a woman and her child being killed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in El Fasher.
However, team investigations proved that the image was clipped from an AI-generated video posted by an account “khoubaib.bz” on Instagram. This demonstrates the campaign’s attempts to use visual content that spread after El Fasher fell to the RSF, and to recycle it in a way that diverts attention from RSF violations and redirects it toward condemning the army.
The campaign’s accounts also circulated an image of a woman hanging from a tree with two children, claiming they were victims of systematic killings against Christians in Sudan. However, the image is misleading and unrelated to Sudan. “Marsad Beam” had previously verified it and found that it was posted on 18 February 2025 on X as an incident in Chad, and then circulated the next day in the context of violence in the Republic of Mali. The same image had also been widely shared, in a misleading context, following the Rapid Support Forces’ takeover of El Fasher.
Following El Fasher capture by the RSF, satellite images from the city have circulated, showing red patches in areas where battles took place between the RSF and the Sudanese army. These were analyzed by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University, suggesting they may indicate massacres and mass killings that occurred after the RSF seized control of the city. International media outlets such as Al Jazeera English and the Associated Press reported on the findings.
Despite the strength of these visual indicators, the reports emphasized that the images alone are insufficient to prove that the red patches are blood without an independent field investigation.
Nevertheless, accounts involved in the campaign seized on these images and published them, claiming they were evidence documenting massacres against Christians in Sudan carried out by Islamist groups. They removed the images entirely from their original context, with the aim of misleading the public and provoking public sympathy.
Beam also verified that the “visual evidence” used in this campaign was manipulated or out of context.
One widely shared image of a woman holding a child with gun shadows was actually taken from an AI-generated video posted on Instagram by “khoubaib.bz.”
Another image of a woman hanging from a tree with two children—circulated as proof of “Christian killings in Sudan”—was unrelated to Sudan; Beam traced it back to posts from Chad and Mali in February 2025.
Meanwhile, genuine satellite images analyzed by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab and reported by Al Jazeera English and AP showed likely mass-killing sites in El Fasher after the RSF takeover—but the campaign misused them to claim “massacres of Christians by Islamists,” stripping them entirely of their verified context.
This campaign, driven by accounts supportive of the UAE and Israel to promote the narrative of “Christians in Sudan being targeted” by extremist Islamist groups within the Sudanese army, reveals a complex form of disinformation. It shows how images and videos circulating on digital platforms can be completely distorted and removed from their context, creating an “alternative narrative” out of nothing by relying on AI-generated visuals or media clipped from their original sources.
Moreover, the pattern of reposting and amplifying the campaign’s narrative by accounts from different countries illustrates the interconnected threads extending from the UAE and Israel to the far right in Europe and North America. The aim is to steer public opinion toward a misleading interpretation of the nature of the conflict in Sudan, rather than accurately conveying the realities on the ground.
Some of the accounts involved in the campaign:
Name | Link |
Amjad Taha | |
Tommy Robinson | |
Dominik Tarczyński MEP | |
Nima Yamini | |
Mario Nawfal | |
Senator Leo Housakos | |
Vivid | |
Robin | |
American AF | |
Eyal Yakoby |
