A smear campaign accusing New York's newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, of being linked to the Islamic State (IS) organization has been launched on social media by American far-right influencers, generating millions of views.

A self-proclaimed socialist, Muslim, born in Uganda to parents from Southeast Asia, 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani is the constant target of attacks on his program and his religion from the far right.

A series of anti-Mamdani accounts on Elon Musk's X platform circulated a statement purportedly issued by ISIS titled "Operation Manhattan Project," alluding to an attack in New York on election day in response to what it termed "American aggression."

Among the influencers who linked this fake press release to Mamdani is Laura Loomer, a conservative activist close to Donald Trump.

"Muslims can think of no better way to celebrate the victory of a Muslim mayoral candidate today than by committing an ISIS attack in New York," Loomer wrote in a post on X that has garnered over 200,000 views.

Other conservative accounts cited this alleged statement to falsely claim that the Islamist group supported Mamdani as mayor.

These posts have accumulated millions of views on the platform.

The alleged ISIS statement reproduced on social media in a letter displaying the logo of Amaq, the Islamic State's propaganda agency, is a fake, several researchers, including the disinformation monitoring group NewsGuard, have asserted.

Meili Criezis, a scholar at American University, told NewsGuard that the statement did not exhibit the usual characteristics of statements coming from Amaq.

"Amaq is used (by ISIS) to share news and claim responsibility for attacks," the researcher explained. "It does not issue threats like those shown in the screenshot."

The Information Epidemiology Lab, another research group, also stated that the released communiqué "differed sharply" from ISIS media practices in terms of language, style, format, and distribution.

The fabricated statement appears to have first emerged on the far-right forum "4chan", known for its conspiracy theories and for spreading hateful, supremacist or neo-Nazi messages.