{UAH} AND GOOK IGNORED ALL THIS TO CALL TRUMP A CONVICTED RAPISTS -> What are our priorities if I will ever ask !!!!!!!!!! This is Wall Street Journal of today Monday

How Peaceful Sweden Became Europe’s Gun-Murder Capital

Scandinavia’s answer to Pablo Escobar orchestrates much of the growing violence from Turkey

A suburb of Stockholm, where gun crime has surged recently.

By Sune Engel Rasmussen

Photographs by Ake Ericson for The Wall Street Journal

May 22, 2023 8:00 am ET

STOCKHOLM—One evening in early March, Swedish police asked the country’s version of “America’s Most Wanted” to broadcast photos of two young men wanted for a shooting on a rival drug gang in Uppsala, north of Stockholm.

Three hours later, unknown gunmen knocked on the door of Serdar Sarihan, the father of one of the suspects. They shot him dead while his wife and their other children were upstairs.

The killing, which Swedish authorities say they believe was a revenge shooting, opened a new chapter of brutality in a wave of gang violence that has turned Sweden, usually known as a peaceful welfare state, into a gun-homicide hot spot in Europe.

Turf wars for control of the drug trade, driven by an influx of guns, personal vendettas and a pool of available youths, many from marginalized migrant communities, have resulted in a gun-homicide rate approximately 2½ times the European average, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.

Sweden’s overall homicide rate is about one-sixth of the U.S.’s. But in a European context, it is extraordinary. With 62 people shot dead last year, up from 45 in 2021, Stockholm’s gun-murder rate was roughly 30 times higher per capita than London’s.

Perpetrators are becoming younger, and are also resorting to increasingly violent tactics such as throwing hand grenades and placing bombs, injuring a growing number of bystanders, including children.

The most notorious gang leader fueling the violence is 36-year-old Rawa Majid, better known as the Kurdish Fox, according to Swedish police and Diamant Salihu, author of two books on Sweden’s organized-crime gangs.

Rawa Majid, also known as the Kurdish Fox, is directing much of the violence in Sweden from Turkey. PHOTO: THE SWEDISH NATIONAL COURT ADMINISTRATION

“Rawa Majid is an entrepreneurial gang leader with ambitions to become a Scandinavian Pablo Escobar,” Salihu said. Swedish police say they believe Majid’s men were behind the killing of Sarihan.

Now running his drug operation from Turkey, beyond the reach of prosecutors, Majid came to Sweden as a newborn in 1986 after his parents had fled Iraqi Kurdistan, where his mother had fought Saddam Hussein’s rule as part of the left-wing Kurdish Peshmerga militia. He later acquired Swedish citizenship.

As a young man, he spent a lot of time with cousins who had started down a criminal path. He received his first, three-month, prison sentence in 2006 at the age of 20. Two other sentences followed, the most recent in 2015, after police found stashes of stolen alcohol, drugs and jewelry in his home.

By the time Majid was released in 2018, he had become known as the Fox. His first name, Rawa, resembles the Swedish word for the animal: räv. His cousin greeted his freedom with a present: a gold chain with a fox charm.

A lawyer for Majid didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The scale of the violence that accompanied the growing gang warfare has shocked many Swedes. The wife of one gang member was shot dead in the street while holding her newborn child in her arms. In January, a restaurant in a trendy neighborhood in central Stockholm was struck by a bomb blast.

Stockholm residents say they worry that their children could be lured into crime.

“I have a son who is 13. It’s easy for him to get tempted,” said one resident of Alby, a southern suburb of the capital. A police helicopter circled above two nearby apartment blocks cordoned off by police after a stabbing an hour earlier. “I grew up here. I always felt safe. Now I am afraid to go outside after 8 p.m.,” she said.

Swedish police appeared to catch a break in 2020, when a Europe-wide investigation infiltrated an encrypted phone network used by criminal gangs called EncroChat. It led to hundreds of arrests. But it also unleashed a war over territory vacated by jailed gang leaders.

Majid exploited the situation, expanding his trafficking network in Sweden and abroad, aided partly by informants in the police force, the EncroChat files showed, before fleeing when one of his couriers was arrested.

He traveled first to Iraqi Kurdistan, where his parents are from, then surfaced in Turkey in early 2022. He told Salihu, the author, that he had obtained Turkish citizenship through his investments there, something that requires a minimum of $400,000.

From there, according to encrypted messages obtained by the Swedish prosecutor, Majid discussed with associates in Sweden how to kill a rival gang member. They suggested using handguns, Kalashnikovs and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Loyalists back home invoked his name to instill fear. A popular young rapper named 5iftyy has posed on Instagram with hundred-dollar bills spelling the word “fox,” and pointing a gun at the camera in front of an entourage whose faces are hidden by fox emojis.

The Stockholm suburb of Alby has been a focal point of the violence.

Residents of Alby have grown increasingly concerned about crime in the area.

Majid continues to be “very active” in ordering violence and running his narcotics business at home, according to Jacob van Rooij, head of the task force in Stockholm’s police that for three years has investigated his activities.

Sweden’s extradition requests, meanwhile, have been rebuffed.

Turkey and Sweden have been at loggerheads since Ankara blocked Stockholm’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, accusing Sweden of sheltering Kurdish militants and telling Stockholm it doesn’t extradite Turkish citizens.

Sweden has raised Majid’s case in negotiations with Ankara to show that Turkey is also reluctant to extradite certain individuals, according to a senior Swedish official who has been present at the talks.

But for now, Majid is safe from prosecution as the violence continues to spiral, dominating the national conversation.

Because most shootings in Sweden take place among individuals from migrant backgrounds, they have fueled a surge of right-wing populism. In the 2022 election, the Sweden Democrats, a party that has roots in Nazism and blames Sweden’s liberal migration policies for the violence, gained more than 20% of the votes to become the country’s second-largest. Today it rejects Nazism and white nationalism on its platform.

The new center-right government has promised to tighten migration policies, double sentences for offenses committed in “gang environments,” widen the use of electronic surveillance and expel more criminals who aren’t Swedish citizens.  

“Compared internationally, we have had a much laxer criminal law. And we have now lost control over the situation,” said Daniel Bergström, an adviser to the Swedish minister of justice.

Experts, however, say there is no simple explanation for the violence.

A cemetery outside Stockholm where many gang members are buried.

Nikoi Djane, a former gang member turned criminologist, said authorities had failed to help refugees integrate into society, instead segregating them from society in housing estates with few job opportunities or treatment for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The perpetrators have a responsibility, but they are also victims of their circumstances,” Djane said.

Manne Gerell, an associate professor at Malmö University with expertise in organized crime, said the problem was caused by poor integration and exacerbated by years of insufficient response from authorities, police and politicians.

Today, an estimated 75% to 80% of deadly shootings remain unsolved, and the low risk of getting caught has prompted a growing number of youths to kill for bounties issued by gang leaders, said Salihu, the crime expert.

In March this year, police said Majid’s men went to the home of Serdar Sarihan after his son Adem became involved in a rival gang, his identity revealed on the television crime show. Sarihan was shot in his doorway, once in the stomach and once in the back.

Adem’s grandfather, Ömer, a civil engineer who came to Sweden from Turkey in 1979, worked for years as a taxi driver before joining Serdar’s real-estate company in Alby. He thinks his son was killed to intimidate Adem and his gang.

“We worked our entire lives. My son had a good life here,” the elder Sarihan said. “What’s happening in Sweden now is not just a conflict between gangs,” he said. “It’s terrorism.”

Ömer Sarihan visits his son’s grave every day.

 

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com

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