Uppsala (Sweden) | AFP
On the night of September 13th, 61yearold Professor Thomas Cervin woke up to the sound of gunshots in his building in Uppsala, near Stockholm. Her neighbor had become the target of the gang war that is spreading terror in Sweden.
Shootings by “child soldiers”, buildings destroyed by homemade explosives, family sacrifices in revenge and morning news reports summarizing the night’s death toll are commonplace in a generally peaceful country.
“Sweden has never experienced anything like this. No other European country has experienced anything like this,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in late September, vowing to defeat these groups. “Swedish legislation was not designed to combat gang warfare and child soldiers. But we are changing that,” he added.
Conflicts between criminal gangs in Sweden have already increased over the past decade, motivated by disputes over control of the drug market. But at the beginning of 2023 there was a drastic change when a fight between rival groups resulted in revenge against family members and people close to the faction members.
The shooting attack on the building in Uppsala, 70 kilometers north of the capital, targeted the motherinlaw of Foxtrot gang leader Rawa Majid, known as the Kurdish Fox. She came out unharmed.
“I had no idea she had a connection to him,” Cervin says. “That’s what scares so many people. The people involved.” [na guerra de facções] They have friends and relatives everywhere.
“The situation is completely out of control: they have started attacking people close to them and people who have nothing to do with these conflicts,” reiterates Felipe Estrada Dorner, professor of criminology at Stockholm University. “It is a big change from the type of violence that has prevailed until today.”
“Culture of Violence”
Since the beginning of 2023, police have recorded 314 shootings, resulting in 47 deaths. For comparison, in 2016 the total number of incidents of this type was 25 and the number of deaths was 7.
In addition, the perpetrators are increasingly younger. According to a report by the National Council for Crime Prevention, in 2022 police investigated 336 minors between the ages of 15 and 17 who were suspected of illegally possessing a firearm, compared to 42 in 2012. The number was therefore taken ten years apart multiplied eightfold.
In the country’s poor suburbs, gangs recruit young people, including those under 15, to carry out contract killings for money, knowing full well that they cannot be sentenced to prison.
In some cases, minors themselves “come into contact with criminal gangs” to offer them murder, says Swedish police chief Anders Thornberg.
Their young age makes these criminals even more dangerous, says Professor Dorner. “They just don’t know how to handle these weapons,” he said. This often results in innocent bystanders being injured or killed.
Evin Cetin, a trained lawyer and author of the book “Mitt ibland Oss” (Among Us) about these young people, says that the majority of violent perpetrators have been under the radar of social services for years.
“They were trained by criminals. They live, eat and breathe a culture of violence,” he says. “Most people I’ve met have a blank stare and don’t even value their own lives.”
The Swedish prime minister whose party, the Moderates, is centerright but whose governing coalition has support from the ultraright attributes the rise in organized crime to immigration policy. It is a common theme on the European right, in an argument that is widely questioned by pundits but resonates with the electorate.
The basis of his victorious election campaign last year was precisely the promise of tougher criminal laws, greater powers for the police, tackling gangs and tougher immigration.