February 2, 2025 - 1:00pm

The murder of notorious Quran burner Salwan Momika this week has shaken Sweden to its core. But this incident only tells part of the story of the brutal violence which has become increasingly commonplace in the Scandinavian country.

Just a day before the shooting of Momika, a relative of internationally wanted drug dealer Rawa Majid — also known as “The Kurdish Fox” — was killed in a suburb just outside Stockholm. This swiftly followed a suspected gang murder in the small university town of Lund, where a career criminal was gunned down by a 17-year-old at a train station. Yet the statistic which most shockingly lays bare the extent of Sweden’s descent into criminality is that there were over 30 bombings across the country in January alone — more than one a day.

These would be staggering numbers for any Western democracy, and Swedish politicians are now likening the situation to “civil war”, albeit a lopsided war between gangs and the authorities which has spread nationally. Intelligence services estimated last year that there are around 62,000 people in Sweden (the total population is just over 10.5 million) who are active in or have direct connections to gangs, while criminal clans with roots in Turkey, Syria and Somalia now operate within the country’s borders. Former deputy police commissioner Mats Löfving has claimed that many of these people come to Sweden with the sole intention of taking part in organised crime.

Löfving’s candour sticks out in a debate characterised by trepidation around fanning the flames of xenophobia, imagined or real. At the heart of the matter lies the fact that a high proportion of criminals — especially the so-called ”child soldiers”, adolescent hitmen as young as 11 recruited by gangs — are the children of immigrants.

It would seem, therefore, that integration in Sweden has actually taken a significant step backwards. While the Left searches for answers in unemployment numbers and social inequality statistics, Rights-wingers frequently insist that it is a more straightforward cultural issue. In this telling, Sweden has admitted too many immigrants from cultures which hold drastically different views on crime, gender equality and conflict management. The result is a volatile mix of youth crime, ethnic disputes, religious extremism and broader cultural decay. This has become an overwhelming, near insoluble problem for the Swedish government.

To stop the daily bombings and shootings, the Social Democratic opposition has gone so far as to propose police visitation zones across all of southern Stockholm, an initiative it opposed just over a year ago when put forward by the conservative government. Confidence in the authorities has not been helped by national police chief Petra Lundh’s admission that she doesn’t work past five o’clock on weekdays and very rarely works at the weekend.

Even Swedes living in affluent neighbourhoods are scared as bombs go off without warning across the country, killing innocent victims as well as intended targets. A citizen being in “the wrong place at the wrong time” has become a sardonic mantra among Swedish journalists and police representatives.

The government tightened citizenship rules last month but closing the borders remains politically contentious, despite Sweden’s governing coalition consisting of three Right-of-centre parties. As a result, ghettos outside cities such as Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Örebro and Linköping are filling up with people who never learn Swedish and live on welfare grants, in some cases, for the rest of their lives. As of December 2022, at least 100,000 of those were ”undocumented”.

This reality, not to mention the fact that the country is host to around 800,000 illiterates thanks to mass immigration, sits in stark contrast to the public image Sweden likes to project of a highly-educated modern democracy which exports engineers and medical researchers to the rest of the world. Politicians can express their bafflement, but nothing will change until they acknowledge how their policies have created this disturbing new criminal landscape. Drastic action is now needed on mass immigration and the gang violence that inevitably comes with it. Otherwise, Sweden will continue on its current path towards perpetual chaos.


Jens Ganman is a Swedish freelance writer and the author of 13 books.

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