The War Beyond Bullets: Narrative Warfare and the Abu Dhabi Agenda

By Sabah Al-Makki

As Sudan defends its sovereignty on the battlefield, it is simultaneously under siege in the media sphere through disinformation campaigns, narrative warfare, and diplomatic sabotage orchestrated by the Abu Dhabi regime.

Weaponized Narratives and the Case for Intervention
On May 4, 2025, The Jerusalem Post published a now-notorious article titled “Hamas’s Next Front? Sudan’s Islamic Army and the African Threat to Israel.” Beneath its alarmist headline, the piece — co-authored by Abu Dhabi regime-linked media operative Amjad Taha and Israeli businessman Eitan Neishlos — laid bare the architecture of a weaponized narrative campaign. Its aim: to delegitimize the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), portray them as a transnational threat, and create rhetorical space for foreign intervention.
This was no isolated editorial. It was part of a broader information war — a campaign to distort Sudan’s alliances, recast its army as a destabilizing force, and justify external meddling under the guise of counterterrorism. In this constructed narrative, Sudan is no longer defending its borders — it is falsely framed as a regional menace.
Sudan now finds itself on the front line of a new kind of warfare — one in which perception, not firepower, has become the primary battleground.

Tracing the Foreign Hand Behind the RSF Militia
Taha and Neishlos offer no credible evidence — only tired tropes. They link the SAF to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, invoking fears of terrorist infiltration. But what they omit is far more revealing.
Multiple investigations and UN reports expose the real source of destabilization: sustained foreign support for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Among them:
• A UN Panel of Experts report dated 14 April 2025 (S/2025/239, para. 95), citing earlier findings (S/2024/65, paras. 41–42), identified three supply routes to the RSF militia, with the most active via eastern Chad. Since June 2023, cargo planes from the Abu Dhabi regime — routed through Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda — have landed regularly at Am Djarass airport, offloading weapons later smuggled to RSF militia bases in Zuruk (North Darfur) and on to Khartoum. The regime denied involvement; Chad did not respond.
• UN-traced weapons seized in Darfur, with markings linked to the UAE. (Reuters, 29 April 2025)
• Coordinated drone strikes on Port Sudan attributed to foreign military collaboration. (Sudan Post, 7 May 2025)
• The presence of Colombian mercenaries and Bulgarian-manufactured arms transported via UAE logistical networks. (France 24 Observers, 17 April 2025)
These revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. They dismantle the manufactured narrative that paints Sudan as the aggressor, revealing instead a foreign-orchestrated hybrid war — one waged with drones, weapons, mercenaries, and disinformation. This is not a campaign for peace, but a coordinated effort to fracture Sudan from within while obscuring the foreign powers directing it from behind the curtain.

The Propaganda Toolkit: Manufactured Fear and Rhetorical Distraction
Unwilling to confront the facts, the article turns to fear-mongering and rhetorical sleight of hand — an attempt to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes. The authors invoke the specter of Osama bin Laden, who left Sudan more than 25 years ago under a completely different regime and geopolitical context, not as analysis, but as a symbolic distraction. The reference serves no explanatory value, only propagandistic utility.
The SAF is and has consistently been a sovereign constitutional institution. Despite successive political transitions, it has remained the backbone of the Sudanese state, the guarantor of national unity, and the defender of Sudanese sovereignty.
The article also rehashes the familiar “Iran connection,” attempting to frame Sudan within a sectarian axis. In reality, Sudan’s restoration of diplomatic ties with Tehran was conducted transparently, under state-level agreements that do not compromise its sovereignty or military independence. Ironically, Tehran maintains diplomatic and commercial relations with the Abu Dhabi regime. Economically, the regime is one of Iran’s top trading partners: in the Iranian calendar year ending March 20, 2025, bilateral trade between Iran and the Abu Dhabi regime reached approximately $27 billion (Tehran Times, 15 January 2025). This fact is conveniently ignored by those pushing the narrative. The goal is not to inform, but to incite — weaponizing familiar scare terms to delegitimize Sudan’s foreign policy choices.
As with much of the modern propaganda machine, substance is replaced with emotionally charged labels: “Muslim Brotherhood,” “bin Laden,” “Iran.” These are not arguments. They are fear triggers that reframe SAF as a threat and create pretexts for intervention.
Figures like bin Laden, and entities such as the Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah, or the Brotherhood, have become elastic propaganda devices — summoned when political or legal arguments fall short. And when they do, the “terrorism file” is reopened — not to reflect reality, but to manufacture consent for aggression.
This is not journalism. It is tabloid-style narrative warfare masquerading as analysis.

Abu Dhabi’s Proxy War and the Architects Behind It
This campaign is not random. It is a deliberate geopolitical project executed by the Abu Dhabi regime as part of a broader Israeli–Western hegemony agenda, with the regime serving as a regional subcontractor for strategic fragmentation and narrative control.
In the world order they envision, Sudan, with its independent army, geostrategic depth, and national coherence, is a problem that needs to be neutralized.
That is why Sudan is framed not as a victim of aggression, but as a destabilizer. This inversion is textbook fifth-generation warfare: not a war over borders, but over beliefs. It is perception, not terrain, that becomes the battlefield.
Sudan faces both fourth-generation warfare, through proxy militias like the RSF, and fifth-generation cognitive warfare, aimed at breaking internal cohesion through information dominance, diplomatic proxies, and psychological pressure.

Media as Ammunition: Staging Soft Power
On May 14, just one week after Sudan severed ties with the UAE, the Abu Dhabi regime’s disinformation machine was on full display. Sharjah TV aired an episode of Maraya (“Mirrors”), a podcast featuring Abdul Rahman Sharfi — a dismissed and discredited Sudanese ambassador since 24 October 2024 (SUNA, 8 May 2025) — falsely presented as if he still held office.
This was no journalistic oversight. It was a choreographed narrative operation. Speaking from a country actively supplying weapons and logistical support to the RSF militia, Sharfi echoed regime propaganda, delegitimizing Sudan’s internationally recognized government and branding its leadership as extremist.
There was no scrutiny. No balance. Only scripted monologues portraying Abu Dhabi as a neutral actor, and Sudan’s Armed Forces and civilian leadership as rogue elements. Even Sudan’s genocide case before the International Court of Justice was dismissed as “media theatre,” with no mention of drone strikes, mass graves, or the France 24 investigation tracing Bulgarian weapons to RSF convoys.
This was not journalism. It was propaganda — wrapped in production value, delivered in a Sudanese accent, and designed to disguise foreign interference as authentic domestic dissent. The viewer is shaped before thought even begins. This is betrayal cloaked in calmness — disinformation softened for public consumption, engineered to wound truth in silence.

But Who Was the Audience?
Did the Abu Dhabi regime honestly imagine this spectacle would persuade those who witness the drones, not the “podcast”? Those who live the devastation, not its scripted retelling. Did it believe a studio production could sway those whose lives are marked by siege, not soundbites?
Was the performance aimed at Sudanese citizens? At the broader Arab public? Or was it, in truth, an act of internal theater — a ritual of self-reassurance staged for the regime’s own echo chamber?
It was never about persuasion. It was about preserving an illusion. It was a spectacle not meant to inform the world but to flatter the regime’s reflection — even as its narrative empire began to crack under the weight of its contradictions.
This is not satire. It is the autopsy of a failed propaganda operation. When spectacle replaces truth, the audience is not convinced — it is insulted.

Sudan’s Resistance: Not Passive, but Strategic
Despite this multifaceted assault, Sudan has not collapsed. Its resistance is not only military but also diplomatic and narrative-driven.
From filing genocide cases at the ICJ to exposing arms networks and challenging misinformation in global forums, Sudan’s leadership has refused to cede the information battlefield. Government spokespersons and civil voices alike have pushed back against foreign propaganda, framing the conflict as what it is: a war of sovereignty, not civil collapse.
As Major General Nabil Abdullah, spokesperson for the SAF, declared in April 2025:
“Sudan’s enemies want to define us by their weapons and lies. We choose to define ourselves by resistance and law.”

Sudan and the Empire of Illusion: Why Resistance Is Intolerable
What the Abu Dhabi regime is doing in Sudan is not spontaneous. It is a structured, externally aligned campaign designed to fracture sovereign states and expand regional control. The pattern is clear:
• Sudan challenges the model: A large, resource-rich nation with sovereign institutions, Sudan refuses to submit to the Abu Dhabi regime’s tutelage or its preferred formula — fragmented, pliable states governed through financial dependency, foreign influence, and militia proxies. Its very existence disrupts the regime’s ambition for unchecked regional dominance.
• External agendas in motion: The Abu Dhabi regime acts as an executor of long-standing Israeli–Western blueprints aimed at neutralizing strategic Arab states — a doctrine rooted in the Ben-Gurion logic of fragmentation and containment. In exchange, it secures political cover and strategic protection, trading autonomy for favor and serving foreign interests at the expense of regional sovereignty.
• Media and diplomacy as instruments of illusion: Lacking demographic weight and bereft of cultural or intellectual legitimacy, the Abu Dhabi regime performs not leadership, but the pageantry of a miniature empire. Obsessed with control and self-image, it arms media outlets, buys influence, and cultivates networks of local clients across targeted states. It rents voices it cannot inspire, staffs embassies as PR firms, and scripts diplomacy as theater. Behind the polished optics and borrowed narratives lies a brittle apparatus — a fragile spectacle cloaked in hollow declarations and applause on demand.
• Warfare laboratories: Sudan has become a live testing ground for hybrid warfare because it has withstood every attempt to bring it down. Militias have been deployed to undermine its national army, and media weaponized to distort its political reality — yet Sudan remains standing. These tools of irregular warfare and narrative subversion are being refined for export to other states deemed “resistant” to foreign hegemony, including Tunisia, Algeria, and beyond.
• Red Sea dominance disrupted: A united Sudan undermines the regime’s ambitions of unchallenged access to Africa’s eastern corridor and strategic Red Sea routes, disrupting its broader geopolitical calculus.
• The danger of inspiration: Sudan’s resilience does more than frustrate external agendas — it inspires. Its survival could awaken dormant resistance across the region, from Yemen to Libya, and even within the UAE.

The War for Meaning: How Sudan Is Being Dismantled Without Invasion
Sudan is under assault not only by drones and militias, but by meaning itself. Hybrid warfare systematically unravels its memory, legitimacy, and future: engineered narratives, diplomatic isolation, and betrayal disguised in local accents.
This is not political opportunism — it is a meticulously designed soft-colonial project. Conceived in foreign strategy rooms and executed by their bloody claw, a regional proxy with ambitions far beyond its stature: the Abu Dhabi regime.
The objective is to weaken Sudan and preempt its potential as a sovereign model, a regional force, or a nation beyond external control.
And Sudan has confronted this system head-on since the moment of its independence, and for that, it is attacked with every weapon that does not carry the name “war,” yet brings nations to their knees.
This is not about Sudan’s fall.
It is about the fear of what Sudan’s rise might be.
This is not a civil war.
It is a hybrid imperial campaign, strategic in design and colonial in intent.
And Sudan — unlike others before it — has chosen to confront it.
Not with submission, but with defiance.
Because if Sudan rises,
the illusion falls.