In April 2025, Sky News Arabia, a TV channel owned by the UAE and headquartered in Abu Dhabi, published a news story claiming that a foreign fighter affiliated with terrorist Islamist groups in Syria was part of the troops aligned with the Sudanese army. Many other news agencies and websites republished the story; shortly thereafter, it went viral and was widely shared on social media. However, there is a serious issue with this story: it is completely false; the presumed Syrian terrorist fighter turned out to be a Sudanese citizen who chose to volunteer with the army along with many other Sudanese citizens. 

This is not an isolated case. For a long time, the UAE, the main backer of the RSF militia in Sudan, has been running a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the reputation of the Sudanese army by associating it with international terrorism. 

The war in Sudan between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces militia broke out in April 2023. Its impact has been devastating; millions were displaced, and thousands were killed, in addition to massive destruction of infrastructure and buildings. 

The RSF emerged primarily from the 2013 restructuring of the notorious Janjaweed militia. Its goal was to support the central government’s counterinsurgency operations in Darfur and South Kordofan. In 2017, the Sudanese parliament passed a law legitimizing its activities. The RSF militia committed countless crimes and atrocities, including the burning of villages, the killing of protesters, sexual violations and rape, unlawful detentions, the targeting of hospitals and churches, and attacks on journalists and media institutions, in addition to ethnic-based killings and recruiting children as soldiers and summary execution of civilans during the ongoing war. 

For years, the UAE has been supporting the RSF militia with weapons, money, and even foreign fighters. This support significantly increased after the outbreak of the war. The UAE has strong economic and political interests in Sudan that it assumes will be secured once the militia takes over power. These interests include exploiting gold and agricultural resources, seizing strategic ports in the Red Sea, and preventing the return of Islamists, its traditional political foe, to power. 

Recently, the UAE started to support the militia by attacking the Sudanese army through spreading false claims that damage its reputation by linking it with Islamic terrorist groups. 

In March 2024, Sky News Arabia shared a report purporting that Ansar al-Sharia members, a terrorist organization sanctioned by the U.S., are partaking in the ongoing war and that their leader was killed in Khartoum. The report also said many other radical groups are fighting in Sudan, but the report was debunked by the Beam Report, an independent Sudanese fact-checking platform. The included video of the organization’s leader’s death was found to have been taken out of context and originally occurred in Somalia. 

A similar accusation was propagated by Erem News, a UAE-based news website, which published a story about a Boko Haram organization attack in Chad. The website quoted an unnamed security expert, claiming that the Sudanese army has strong ties with radical groups in West Africa. Indeed, no solid facts on the ground or results from independent investigations were provided to back up this claim.  

The Abu Dhabi Network shared a video titled “Who is behind the ongoing war in Sudan?”. The video claims the al-Bara’ ibn Malik Brigade, a military group that fights alongside the Sudanese Army and gained popularity from winning several battles in the war, has its roots in Al-Qaeda and is responsible for the destruction of Sudan. While brigade members are formed essentially from the alliance of the deposed regime, the group is strongly influenced by the Islamic Brotherhood movement, which is quite distinctive from Al-Qaeda. 

In another instance resembling the previous tactics, Euronews published a story detailing a secretive meeting between Boko Haram and the Sudanese army. The piece was removed after the website’s legitimacy was called into question by a disinformation researcher, but the website still publishes stories that malign the Sudanese army and describe the RSF leader as a man of peace, while the militia’s previous and current genocides and violations in Darfur say exactly the opposite.  1  

This disinformation campaign is also pushed and peddled by UAE think tanks ,  academics,  political analysts, and writers, as well as by a UAE-based ex-Sudanese prime minister who warned of Sudan becoming a fertile ground for jihadis and a sanctuary for extremist factions and terrorist groups posing a threat to regional and international security. 

The RSF militia also repeated the same false information by saying Iranian arms and Houthis are fighting with the Sudanese army in Sudan. While Iran supplied the Sudanese army with arms, there is no evidence to the RSF’s baseless claim. 

Indeed, in October 2020, the U.S. removed Sudan from the state-sponsor of terrorism countries list. 

The UAE has several objectives behind this campaign, including crafting a narrative for the West to justify the dismantling of the Sudanese army and fostering a scenario where the RSF militia assumes power. Furthermore, it seeks to divert attention from the genocides and war crimes perpetrated by the militia in Darfur, along with its ongoing support through arms shipments that have faced international condemnation and, paradoxically, its confirmed supply of Colombian mercenaries to the militia. 

As this campaign continues to unfold, it remains one of the primary tools that the UAE is employing to conduct its war in Sudan. Journalists and fact-checking organizations will play a vital role in uncovering it. Social media platforms are urged to allocate more resources to enforce their policies and take appropriate measures to monitor and expose any future activities of this campaign.

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