Amil Imran Khan
British journalist and founder of Valent Projects, a communications contractor linked to Foreign Office Syria work
| Amil Imran Khan | |
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| Born | January 1976 |
| Died | |
| Nationality | British |
| Residence | |
| Occupation | Journalist, communications adviser, company director |
| Known for | Founding Valent Projects; Foreign Office-linked Syria communications work |
| Parents | |
| Spouse(s) | |
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| Sibling(s) | |
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| Predecessor | |
| Website | |
Amil Khan (born January 1976) is a British former Reuters and BBC journalist and the founder and director of Valent Projects Ltd, a London company that sells tools and advice for detecting and responding to online manipulation.[1][2] He has described moving from Middle East reporting into advisory work on Syria and, later, into commercial “counter-disinformation”.[3] Reporting by The Grayzone, drawing on leaked contractor files and emails, places him inside British Foreign Office-funded strategic communications programmes during the Syrian war and, later, in proposals for information operations against critics of British policy on Ukraine.[4][5]
Public UK disclosures located for this profile do not include a published Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office award notice naming Valent Projects as supplier. What is on the public record is the company filing, a UK Research and Innovation grant to Valent Projects Ltd, and Khan’s own accounts of government advisory work.[1][6] Separately, The Grayzone has reported that he worked for Foreign Office contractors including InCoStrat, which that outlet describes as MI6-run, and that he was nominated to an information-operations role in the leaked Project Alchemy papers.[4][5]
Journalism
A 2010 profile on The Guardian described Amil Khan as a former Reuters Middle East correspondent who had spent six years in the region covering politics, war and economics, then worked in London on documentaries and on security and extremism.[7] The same profile said he was then working in Pakistan “on a project to challenge the religious legitimacy claimed by extremists”.[7]
In a 2024 interview with The Drum, Khan said he graduated in languages shortly after 2001 and, as an Arabic and Persian speaker based in Cairo, began as a freelance journalist with Reuters before moving into documentaries.[3] The Foreign Policy Centre, where he is listed as a research fellow, describes an “award-winning career in journalism, working for the BBC and Reuters as a foreign correspondent and documentary film maker focusing on violent insurgencies in Iraq and Sudan”.[2]
Syria communications work
Khan has said that work on Syria was the point at which he moved into disinformation. As The Drum reported his account: “I ended up working on Syria and that’s when the phrase disinformation really became popularized. My window on that was seeing the chemical weapons attacks that happened between 2013 and 2017.”[3] In a 2020 article for The Foreign Policy Centre he wrote: “From 2013 to 2017, I worked with Syrian activists hoping to remove the corrupt and abusive regime in Damascus.”[8]
The Foreign Policy Centre biography states that until recently he “was a UK government senior strategic communications expert with a special focus on international conflict” and that he “advised several UK government departments as well as senior decision makers from governments across Middle East and Africa”.[2] It also describes him as a former associate fellow of Chatham House.[2]
Leaked files reported by The Grayzone place him inside the contractor layer of that effort. A February 2022 article by Kit Klarenberg quoted an InCoStrat document, in a section on developing contacts in Arabic-speaking conflict-affected states, as saying that “in his previous career as a journalist” Khan had “established relationships with, and embedded himself into terrorist organizations in the UK and the Middle East”, gaining “unique insight into their narratives, communication methods, recruitment processes and management of networks”.[4] The same article reported that a profile for a December 2015 House of Lords event hosted by the Franco-British Society, at which he appeared beside former MI5 director-general Eliza Manningham-Buller, said he was “providing political and media support to opposition political and military groups fighting the regime”.[4]
Klarenberg reported that the work was carried out for Foreign Office contractors including ARK, described in the article as founded by probable MI6 officer Alistair Harris, and InCoStrat, founded by former Foreign Office political officer Emma Winberg and military intelligence officer Paul Tilley.[4] A later Grayzone article stated that Khan “participated in the British Foreign Office’s lavish program to foment regime change in Syria, working for a variety of intelligence cutouts, including MI6-run InCoStrat”.[5] Those characterisations are the outlet’s, based on the leaked files it says it reviewed. They are not a published government confirmation that Khan was employed by MI6.
Valent Projects
Valent Projects Ltd (company number 08119752) was incorporated on 26 June 2012 as Breakthrough Communications Ltd and renamed on 25 April 2017.[1] It is an active private limited company, registered at 332 Ladbroke Grove, North Kensington, London W10 5AD, with nature of business 62012 (business and domestic software development).[1] Amil Imran Khan, British, born January 1976, has been a director since incorporation.[9] Kaleem Khan, British, born August 1984, was appointed director on 5 April 2023.[9] Eleanor Khan was secretary from 26 June 2012 until resigning on 17 July 2024.[9]
| Name | Role | Appointed | Resigned | Born | Nationality |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amil Imran Khan | Director | 26 June 2012 | — | January 1976 | British |
| Kaleem Khan | Director | 5 April 2023 | — | August 1984 | British |
| Eleanor Khan | Secretary | 26 June 2012 | 17 July 2024 | — | — |
The Foreign Policy Centre dates the founding of the agency to late 2019 and describes it as “a digital communications agency for social impact”. Khan told The Drum that Valent “came out of those technical aspects of disinformation” he had seen on Syria, in particular coordinated accounts rather than fact-checking of content. The company’s public description of its product, Ariadne, is a tool to detect inauthentic networks and classify narratives.
UK public funding located
UK Research and Innovation lists project 10101274, “AI-powered narrative extraction and classification to combat misinformation and disinformation”, with Valent Projects Ltd as lead participant and Fergus McKenzie-Wilson as project manager. The Gateway to Research record gives a project cost of £89,231 and a grant offer of £62,462. The abstract states that, “in 2020, when Valent Projects began operations”, the firm detected “inauthentic networks that drive disinformation and online manipulation for government and private sector clients”, and that the grant would extend Ariadne so that it could “detect and classify strategic narratives”. No Contracts Finder or Find a Tender award notice naming Valent Projects as an FCDO supplier was located in searches for this profile. Government funding that is on the open record here is the UKRI grant above.
Sudan
A January 2025 article by Hamid Khalafallah for the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy reported that Valent Projects examined 12,545 tweets using a pro-Sudanese Armed Forces hashtag and “found out that the top 5 percent of the accounts had classic indicators of bot/troll activity, including generic account names, mass posting, and account registration around the time of the 2019 revolution”.Hamid Khalafallah, Beyond the Battlefield: Sudan’s Virtual Propaganda Warzone Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, 14 January 2025. The article said the agency “suggested that only 10 percent of the examined tweets seemed to be by authentic accounts” and that the pro-SAF traffic “showed large-scale manipulation promoting escalation”. The Grayzone has given a different account of the same line of work. Its November 2024 article said Valent “identified residents of Sudan voicing online criticism of the since-disintegrated, USAID-supported government in Khartoum, then petitioned social media platforms to delete their accounts and pages on bogus grounds, with some success”, and linked the work to a Chemonics project funded by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives.
Project Alchemy and approaches to government
In June 2022 The Grayzone published leaked emails in which, it reported, Khan proposed to journalist Paul Mason “a clever John Oliver style stunt that makes [The Grayzone] a laughing stock” and a “full nuclear legal to squeeze them financially”.[10] The article said Khan offered to host a meeting at Valent Projects’ London offices and contacted a friend at the National Security Council Communications Directorate, a Whitehall unit “tasked with hybrid threats”. A November 2024 Grayzone article, based on further leaked files, said Khan was listed as a leader of Project Alchemy’s “Info Ops” team. It quoted an email of 22 April 2022 from Dominic Morris to Matthew Waterfield of the Partnership Fund for a Resilient Ukraine, describing Khan as a “StratComms Ninja” and writing: “you know Amil, he’s the best in the business and has been working against this adversary for years.” The article reported Khan’s reply as offering “past performance in identifying, monitoring and closing” activity it characterised as pro-Russian disinformation aimed at “US hard right” and “UK hard left” audiences. The same files, as reported, assigned Project Alchemy information operations to the 77th Brigade, the British Army’s psychological warfare unit. A March 2026 Grayzone article on GCHQ and the National Cyber Security Centre again described Khan as the “self-appointed ‘disinformation expert’ and psychological warfare veteran” with whom Paul Mason had plotted “a civil society counter-offensive on The Grayzone”.[11]
See also
Valent Projects InCoStrat ARK Project Alchemy 77th Brigade Research, Information and Communications Unit Conflict, Stability and Security Fund
External links
Amil Khan on LinkedIn Amil Khan at The Foreign Policy Centre VALENT PROJECTS LTD at Companies House UKRI project 10101274
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Companies House, VALENT PROJECTS LTD overview Companies House, accessed 5 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 The Foreign Policy Centre, Amil Khan The Foreign Policy Centre, accessed 5 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Richard Draycott, Online misinformation expert Amil Khan voices media concerns on Politics for Drummies The Drum, 28 June 2024.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Kit Klarenberg, Propagandist for Syria terror proxies compromised Amnesty International, leaked docs show The Grayzone, 8 February 2022.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 The Grayzone, Leaked files expose high-level UK military plot to destroy The Grayzone The Grayzone, 20 November 2024.
- ↑ UK Research and Innovation, AI-powered narrative extraction and classification to combat misinformation and disinformation Gateway to Research, project reference 10101274, accessed 5 October 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 The Guardian, Amil Khan The Guardian, profile text dated to articles from 2002–2010, accessed 5 October 2026.
- ↑ Amil Khan, Coronavirus response shows Disinformation is the new normal The Foreign Policy Centre, 30 March 2020.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Companies House, VALENT PROJECTS LTD officers Companies House, accessed 5 October 2026.
- ↑ Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal, Paul Mason’s covert intelligence-linked plot to destroy The Grayzone exposed The Grayzone, 7 June 2022.
- ↑ Kit Klarenberg, Paul Mason instigated GCHQ targeting of The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg, leaks reveal The Grayzone, 22 March 2026.