Valve has removed a game from Steam in the UK that puts players in the shoes of a Palestinian fighter raiding Israeli Defense Force positions on October 7, 2023 at the request of the UK’s Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, which is tasked with removing extremist content from the internet.
The game, Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is still available to buy in the U.S., and was originally released on Steam in 2022. The game made some headlines last year when it was highlighted by the conservative Twitter account LibsOfTikTok, which was appalled that it “allows players to simulate being a Hamas te*ro*ist who k*lls Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem while shouting “‘Allahu Akbar.’”
Earlier this month, the game’s Brazilian developer Nidal Nijm released the “Operation al-Aqsa Flood Update,” which allows players to recreate some aspects of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. A trailer for that update hosted on Mega opens with the white on black text on the screen that says “Where are those who carry the explosive belts? Where are them? Come here, I want an explosive belt to blow up myself over the Zionists!!!” It then shows Hamas fighters landing motorized paragliders into an Israeli Defense Force base and killing Israeli soldiers. The trailer also shows Hamas fighters executing a female Israeli soldier on her knees by shooting her in the back of the head, something Nijm later told me players can’t do and are actually penalized for in the game.
The game’s Steam page does not mention Hamas, but the player character has the recognizable green headband associated with the organization, and the game is clearly suggesting players are Hamas or another Palestinian armed group by referencing the name of the operation and the paragliders.
On October 22, Valve contacted Nijm to inform him it had removed the game from sale in the UK, according to emails viewed by 404 Media.
“We've received a request from authorities in the UK to block the game and have applied such country restrictions,” the Valve representative said in the email to Nijm.
“It's sad to hear this, because, as we all know, my game is not too much different than any other Shooter Game on Steam, like Call of Duty, in example,” Nijm replied. “But did they give you a specific reason?”
The same Valve representative responded that: “We were contacted by the Counter Terrorism Command of the United Kingdom, specifically the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU). As with any authority for a region the [sic] oversees and governs what content can be made available, we have to comply with their requests. Unfortunately, I don't have a contact available to refer you to.”
CTIRU, which is run by the Metropolitan Police, was set up in 2010 to investigate and remove “extremist online material” by reporting it to internet platforms. In 2018, the agency said it had worked to get 310,000 pieces of extremist online material removed since it was founded. Many of these removals are initially reported to CTIRU by the public, with CTRIU saying that between January to November of that year it received almost 1,300 reports from the public.
“The CTIRU works closely with a range of technology, social media and online service providers, but we do not comment on specific content or any communication we may have with specific platforms or providers," a Counter Terrorism Policing spokesperson told me in an email.
Valve did not respond to a request for comment.
This isn’t the first time Fursan al-Aqsa has been blocked in certain regions. It’s blocked in Germany and Australia because it doesn’t have an age rating, which Nijm said that, due to the currency conversion rate in Brazil, is too expensive for him to obtain at 5,000 Euros and 2,000 Australian dollars. The block in the UK, he said, is different.
“The region lock of my game in the UK was clearly due to political reasons (they are accusing my game of being ‘terrorist’ propaganda), Nijm told me in an email.
He said he is “forever grateful to Valve for allowing the publishing of my game on Steam in the first place,” that it is one of the few companies that “truly respect freedom of creativity,” and that he understands the company removed the game because it has to comply with local laws.
“So I do not blame Valve nor Steam, the blame is on the UK Government and Authorities that are pissed off by a videogame,” Nijm said. “On their flawed logic, the most recent Call of Duty Black Ops 6 should be banned as well. As you play as an American Soldier and go to Iraq to kill Iraqi people. What I can say is that we see clearly the double standards.”
I’ve played Fursan al-Aqsa and, just as a game, it sucks. It feels like Nijm bought some assets from a 3D model marketplace, sprinkled in some Israeli flags, and constructed a few plain, uninteresting levels for players to shoot their way through. It’s a functional shooter at the most basic level, but removed from its subject matter it does nothing new or interesting and feels like the lowest form of shovelware, which Steam is filled with.
Speaking about the decision to show Hamas fighters executing Israeli soldiers but penalizing players for killing unarmed soldiers in the actual game, Nijm said “I have made this cutscene just to ‘trigger’ zionists and to piss them off, and as well to bring into the table what means freedom of speech in reality? Why was everyone ok with the infamous mission ‘No Russian’ in Call of Duty Modern Warfare but they can't tolerate my game?”
“No Russian,” to the uninitiated, is an infamous mission from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player takes part in a brutal terrorist attack at a Russian airport where dozens of civilians are killed in a mass shooting. It was, famously, not “ok” with everyone. The level leaked prior to release and caused a stir in the games and mainstream press. The level was not included in the Russian release of the game, and in the Japanese and German version of the game players were penalized for shooting civilians.
Fursan al-Aqsa tries very hard to be edgy—literally labeling itself as the “Most BASED game of all times!!!”—which mostly comes off as pathetic but at times is also darkly hilarious. The first mission starts with a cutscene of you parachuting into Camp Ariel Sharon, a real IDF military base named after the country’s former prime minister, cutting off an IDF soldier’s head with a sword, kicking the head into the air, then throwing the sword and impaling it through the face. If playing the game felt this over the top and absurd it might actually be fun, but it feels like a canceled Max Payne clone from 2001 that didn’t make it out of the prototype phase.
However, I have also played Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and Nijm is definitely making a fair point. His description of how the game treats Iraqi soldiers doesn’t even convey how fully dehumanized they are in that game, which seems especially in bad taste now that it is widely agreed upon that what the U.S. military did to Iraq was one of the worst mistakes in the history of foreign policy. This is not to mention countless other Call of Duty and other first-person shooter games in which Arabs, Russians, and other nationalities are treated as nothing more than canon fodder. If you, like me, played video games your entire life you probably have killed hundreds of thousands of Arab video game NPCs. Fursan al-Aqsa’s violation and the reason the UK appears to have deemed it “extremist” is that in this case the player character is a Palestinian and the enemies are Israeli soldiers.
Another notable difference is that while Call of Duty has increasingly flirted with referencing real and current conflicts (the first Modern Warfare, which has levels that resemble the U.S. invasion of Iraq but takes place in a fictional country, came out only four years after the invasion), the Operation al-Aqsa Flood Update is referencing a shocking attack that is just over a year old, and is now still an active war.
Again, my professional opinion as someone who reviewed video games for many years is that Fursan al-Aqsa sucks, and also in bad taste if you choose to judge it in that way. As Nijm points out, the same is true for Call of Duty. Valve so far has not made the distinction between the two, but the UK government has.
