Abdalmonim Alrabea, often seen as a pleasant individual, raises eyebrows due to his controversial affiliations. When I visited his apartment, located in a 1970s building just a short drive from Sheffield’s city center, he greeted me warmly with a handshake and a welcoming smile. Inviting me inside, he maintained a courteous demeanor.

Respecting his cultural customs, I offered to remove my shoes, and he gestured for me to sit on one of the neatly arranged sofas in his living room. The room was tastefully decorated, featuring a vase of flowers on the table and a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. Alrabea even extended the offer of a cup of tea, setting a seemingly hospitable tone.

However, the 44-year-old former taxi driver from Darfur has a more complex narrative. Alrabea stands accused of supporting the violent conflict ripping through his native Sudan from behind the scenes.

Residing in Britain since entering the country illegally in 2008, Alrabea has been leveraging his online presence to rally support for the Sudanese guerrilla faction known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), notorious for its brutal campaigns.

Since 2023, the RSF has waged a genocidal campaign against non-Arab African ethnic groups in Sudan. The world took notice last month when the RSF’s brutal actions culminated in their capture of Al Fashir, the capital of North Darfur, revealing the extent of the conflict’s horror.

One of the most shocking incidents, evoking global outrage, occurred when Abu Lulu, a notorious RSF fighter, and his team brazenly executed healthcare workers and patients at Al Fashir’s Saudi Maternity Hospital, highlighting the devastating impact of the group’s violence.

In all, 460 people are reported to have been killed at the hospital, with the Sudan Doctors Network claiming the RSF ‘killed everyone they found inside the hospital, including patients, their companions and anyone else present’.

It was this monster – whose actions were seen as so heinous that he was taken into custody by his own high command – that Alrabea allegedly hosted last month on his TikTok account, which boasted almost 250,000 followers before it was banned for ‘violating policies on violent and criminal behaviour’.

Abdalmonim Alrabea, a former taxi driver and father of two, is accused of playing a crucial behind-the-scenes role in the orgy of violence that is tearing apart his homeland of Sudan

Alrabea posted photographs of himself standing on a tank in Sudan, which he visited shortly after the current civil war first erupted

‘Today I killed 2,000 people and then I lost count,’ the man believed to be Abu Lulu said on the platform. ‘I want to start again from zero.’

Alrabea, filming himself from the comfort of his car, as he often does, laughed, later saying he wants to ‘f**k these ‘falangayat’ up and down’ – the word ‘falangayat’ being a racist and derogatory term the RSF use in reference to indigenous groups in Darfur.

In another video, from 2023, Alrabea claimed that ‘if the [RSF] rape, it is not a problem’.

In November of that year, the former Amazon delivery driver, who says he is studying business and management remotely at Canterbury Christ Church University, visited Sudan shortly after the current civil war first erupted.

He posted photographs of himself standing on a tank and interviewed the RSF’s deputy-commander, Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, who had been sanctioned by the US two months earlier for human rights abuses, including the ‘massacre of civilians, ethnic cleansing and use of sexual violence’.

Today, Alrabea stands accused of being one of the most high-profile propagandists and recruiters for the RSF. But while his social media pages are repeatedly taken down for violating community guidelines and he has been investigated by police in the UK, he remains free to spout his ideology online.

In a meeting with the Daily Mail last week, Alrabea remained unrepentant over his views despite mounting evidence that the RSF is committing war crimes.

Asked about reports of the RSF massacre at the maternity hospital in Al Fashir, he said: ‘It’s fake news.’

Claiming the reports may have been manufactured by artificial intelligence, he said that his TikTok video with Abu Lulu was ‘only joking’ and praised the RSF for fighting against the Sudanese government. He later claimed Abu Lulu was not in fact on the video and somebody else had been assuming his identity.

‘I don’t support the killing of any civilians or the people in Sudan,’ he said. ‘But I support the RSF because they are fighting against the Sudanese army.’

He said he was jailed in Sudan for railing against the government and arrived in the UK ‘on a ship’ over the Channel before being granted asylum, originally settling in Wakefield before moving to Sheffield. He has been a British citizen since 2017.

He claims the RSF is attempting to ‘bring democracy’ to Sudan and said the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organisation, had corrupted his country’s armed forces.

‘We face hatred and blocks from people who want to shut our mouths and not speak for the sake of democracy in Sudan,’ he claimed, before insisting again that the hospital massacre was ‘a fabrication’.

‘People have never committed these massacres as has been claimed,’ he said. ‘If I see evidence [of war crimes] I will speak loudly against any crime committed in Sudan.’ Alrabea posts videos on an almost daily basis to a YouTube channel, which boasts more than 4,000 subscribers, with most of them featuring the former taxi driver in his car talking about the conflict in Sudan.

Online platform Sudan In The News, which has been monitoring Alrabea’s output, has accused him of ‘justifying the RSF’s use of rape as a weapon of war from the very same taxi he uses to transport women’. He is understood to have stopped working as a taxi driver last year.

In Al Fashir, more than 2,000 people are thought to have been massacred by the RSF last month as they took control of the city.

It was under siege for more than a year, walled off from the rest of the country by the paramilitaries, with its inhabitants left to starve – reportedly surviving on animal feed and weeds.

Such was the scale of the slaughter, the blood-stained ground could allegedly be seen from space. Alrabea visited the city as recently as June, when parts were already under RSF control.

While Sudan has been in a state of civil war since 2023, the roots of the conflict date back to 2019, when president Omar al-Bashir – who came to power in a coup in 1989 – was ousted.

A joint military-civilian government was established in 2021 with the head of the country’s armed forces and the leader of the RSF initially working together. But they fell out and fighting between the two forces began in April 2023.

Unusually, the RSF’s appalling actions are often broadcast on social media, with fighters such as Abu Lulu apparently seeing themselves as freedom-fighting celebrities.

 In one video, RSF fighters could be seen laughing as they rode on the back of a pickup truck past a succession of dead bodies.

‘Look at all this work,’ one says. ‘Look at this genocide. They will all die like this.’

Others portray the slaughter of captives with unflinching barbarity. In one such video starring the dread-locked Abu Lulu himself, a dozen petrified men sit on scorched desert sand, pleading for their lives. 

Unusually, the RSF’s appalling actions are often broadcast on social media, with fighters such as Abu Lulu apparently seeing themselves as freedom-fighting celebrities

What follows is merciless slaughter, with volleys of bullets ripping into the defenceless prisoners, their bodies jerking as each round hits home. The summary executions complete, Abu Lulu turns to the camera and smiles.

But Alrabea maintains that, while he supports the RSF for what he sees as attempting to bring democracy to Sudan, he is not an active ‘recruiter’ for the paramilitary group. ‘My videos explain to people what is happening in Sudan,’ he said. ‘A lot of people don’t know what is going on. The platforms are often controlled by the army.’

Alrabea’s unrepentant support, from the country which gave him asylum, is at odds with the evidence in the public domain. Last year, Human Rights Watch published an 89-page report into sexual violence committed by the RSF in Khartoum, which revealed that children were being forced into marriage and women and girls were being held in conditions that could amount to ‘sexual slavery’.

This evidence appears to have done nothing to undermine Alrabea’s support.

Often breaking out into a smile, the softly-spoken activist simply claimed the mounting evidence is ‘not true’. He disagreed that rape was being used as a weapon and claimed those left in Al Fashir after it was stormed by the RSF were not civilians.

On why he records so many videos, he said: ‘I need to show the people what are facts, what is the truth. The Sudanese army are only sending fake news in the media. It doesn’t give the people what are the facts.’

He said he couldn’t accept reports of RSF atrocities, comparing it to the war in Gaza. He said: ‘Some people say Hamas is firing, some people say Israel is killing. But if you can’t go inside the country how can you know? I’m not going to say 100 per cent it [RSF massacres] didn’t happen but we need to make investigation to know what is going on there.’

Abdallah Abnu Garda, chairman of the Darfur Diaspora Association, which campaigns for genocide survivors in the UK, told the Daily Mail that Alrabea was ‘deliberately provoking genocide survivors who have made the United Kingdom their home’ and ‘exploiting this country’s protections for freedom of expression to spread hate speech without accountability’.

Last Friday, he made a formal complaint about Alrabea’s online postings to South Yorkshire Police after revelations about his conduct were first reported in the Guardian.

‘Despite our repeated reports to the relevant authorities, no action has been taken to stop him,’ he said. ‘His conduct escalated to its peak when he hosted the killer known as ‘Abu Lulu’ on his TikTok platform, the same individual who executed innocent civilians on a live stream. Shockingly,

Alrabea advised him, ‘You can kill, but don’t film it’.

‘We believe British authorities have been slow to intervene, despite the gravity of his actions. This matter must be treated with the seriousness it warrants.

‘We urge the authorities to immediately open a formal investigation into his activities, including his use of online platforms to disseminate harmful and potentially criminal content.

‘Freedom of speech must never be used as a shield for hate speech or the incitement of violence.’

Meanwhile, as at least 13 million people are displaced from their homes in Sudan owing to the war, Alrabea, from his neat suburban living room continues to offer support to the rebels who are terrorising and massacring minority groups in the country from which he fled.