Sweden calls up the army to help deal with gang violence

The gang situation in Sweden has been bad for a while but this summer it has gotten significant worse. The gangs are mostly made up of foreigners and earlier this month the country was shocked when a 13-year-old boy was found murdered in a forest area. Two fourteen-year-olds were murdered near Stockholm earlier in the summer. But the situation keeps getting worse with 12 people dead from gang violence this month alone. Remember, Sweden has roughly the same population as the state of Georgia and historically has had a very low murder rate.

Last year, more than 60 people died in shootings in Sweden – the highest on record – and this year is set to be the same or worse.

An official government report published in 2021 stated that four in every million inhabitants were dying in shootings each year in Sweden – compared with 1.6 people per million across Europe.

Police have linked the violence to poor integration of immigrants, a widening gap between rich and poor and drug use.

The most recent shock came when a young woman named Soha Saad, who had just graduated from university and was about to become a middle school teacher, was killed in an explosion apparently aimed at gang members living in her building.

It was early Thursday morning that a powerful explosion took place in the residential area Fullerö Hage in Storvreta, north of Uppsala.

The crime is believed to be aimed at relatives of Rawa “Kurdish Fox” Majid. Soha Saad lives with her family in one of the relatives’ neighboring houses.

Soha Saad was taken to hospital, but her life could not be saved. Two men have been arrested, suspected of murder and aggravated public danger.

That appears to have been the last straw. Last night, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson made a televised speech to the nation and announced he was calling in the army to help deal with the crisis.

“Tomorrow I will meet the national police chief and the commander in chief to see how the defense force can help the police in their work against the criminal gangs,” Kristersson said in an address to the nation on Thursday…

“I can’t emphasize enough how serious the situation is. Sweden has never seen anything like it, no other country in Europe is experiencing anything like this,” the Swedish prime minister said.

“We will hunt the gangs, and we will defeat the gangs. We will take them to court. If they’re Swedish citizens they will be locked up for a long time in prison and if they are foreign citizens, they will also be expelled.”

Kristersson specifically mentioned the death of Soha Saad saying, “This is a difficult time for Sweden. A 25-year-old woman went to bed last night on a completely ordinary evening but never got to wake up.”

The violence and bombings in Sweden have had a major impact on the country’s politics. Last year, voters made the right-wing Sweden Democrats the 2nd biggest party in parliament and effectively made Kristersson, leader of a center-right party, the Prime Minister.

Kristersson formed a center-right minority government after last year’s election with support of the populist and anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, ending eight years of Social Democrat-led governments in Sweden.

His coalition won the election partly on a promise to stem growing gang violence, and it has launched a series of initiatives, such as greater powers to police and harsher punishment for gun crimes.

The measures have yet to take effect, but Kristersson blamed former governments for the problems.

“It is an irresponsible immigration policy and a failed integration that has brought us here,” Kristersson said.

Sweden had liberal immigration policies for many decades and took in more immigrants per capita than any other European nation during the 2015 migration crisis. Those policies were reversed by the former Social Democrat-led government, but have been tightened by Kristersson’s government. About 20% of Sweden’s 10.5 million inhabitants were born abroad.

It’s worth noting that the connection between immigration and the current violence is not a right-wing fever dream. In fact, the figures are quite clear, though the former government and their media allies did their best to rule the question out of bounds.

Among shooting suspects, 85 percent are first- or second-generation immigrants, according to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, as immigrant neighborhoods have become hotbeds for gang crime. National Police Commissioner Anders Thornberg has described the violence as “an entirely different kind of brutality than we’ve seen before” and his deputy, Mats Löfving, says that 40 criminal clans now operate throughout the country. Spreading fear are “humiliation robberies,” targeting children and youth, in which victims are subjected to degrading treatment by assailants, such as being urinated upon. Just this week, four men were sentenced for robbing, beating and urinating on an 18-year-old, who was also filmed by his tormentors…

When stories started appearing about gang-rule and attacks on people going into immigrant neighborhoods, sometimes referred to as “no-go zones,” a government agency started a PR campaign to rename them “go-go zones.” The government had help from left-leaning Swedish media. In 2015, the editorial page of Dagens Nyheter, for instance, said that people expressing alarm about crime were “safety-deniers,” and compared them to climate deniers. The Social Democratic publication Aftonbladet said in 2017 that the idea that Sweden needed to recruit more police officers was “populism at its worst,” given that “crime is declining”.

Meanwhile, the link between immigration and crime was turned into a taboo topic.

Aftonbladet, for instance, argued that there was no need for authorities to publish statistics on immigrants and crime because the very idea was inherently racist. Then-Prime Minister Stefan Löfven reiterated the same notion when he was asked whether immigration had affected crime levels. “We should act against what is wrong and criminal no matter the background and the cause. I don’t want to link crime to ethnicity,” he said in 2020––as if there were no legitimate questions about how his government’s immigration policy had affected crime.

The effort to hide the evidence that this was an immigrant wave failed and the government which tried to ignore the problem is now gone. Police officials estimate there are about 30,000 gang members nationwide who are contributing to the shootings and bombings. Here’s a bit of PM Kristersson’s speech.