Sweden struggles to stop radicalization at home

GOTHENBURG, Sweden — The first amplified call to prayer in Sweden was not publicly broadcast until 2013, when it reverberated out from a minaret of the Fittja Mosque in southwestern Stockholm on a Friday morning. In the run-up to that historic moment, local Muslims faced a wide range of opposition, including accusations that the azan violated noise regulations and claims from the far right that broadcasting the call amounted to disseminating Islamic propaganda. While Sweden is deeply attached to its reputation as a democratic, secular, humanitarian superpower — having provided safe haven for refugees from Chile’s Pinochet regime, secular leftists fleeing Iran’s Islamic revolution and a massive influx of Syrians and Afghans escaping their present crises — historically speaking, Sweden’s experience of other cultures and religions is still in its infancy. In the 1970s and ’80s, Swedes spoke in terms of assimilation (a term they have since updated to “integration”) and its companion concept, mångfald, roughly equivalent to “diversity.” Sweden’s dedication to mångfald is promoted in work and employment opportunities and lauded in the country’s daily papers. Yet while equal opportunity exists in theory, many of Sweden’s immigrants feel a pervasive sense of societal exclusion.

Gothenburg, a port city and former industrial powerhouse on Sweden’s rain-swept west coast, is probably most comparable to Seattle or Baltimore. In the wake of the 1970s oil crisis, its world-class shipbuilding, ball bearing and automobile industries fell into decline, leaving behind a burned-out landscape of factories and warehouses that in the late 1990s began to be reimagined as a gritty hub for the creative class. Today, Gothenburg is one of Sweden’s most diverse cities, its working-class heritage celebrated in a new much-vaunted Volvo commercial that portrays immigrant residents going about their early morning rituals before heading in to the assembly plant — mångfald, equal opportunity, a new Gothenburg, for everybody.

Sweden and Gothenburg in particular are now reckoning with this problem. “Most people who go fight with ISIL from Malmö, Stockholm or other cities in Sweden arrange their travel with people from Gothenburg,” said Karwan Faraj, a longtime Angered youth organizer. “The reason is that there are a few big families here in Gothenburg who have good networks down in Syria with these groups — sons, cousins, nephews, relatives already down there fighting. Gothenburg is the strongest base for these recruiting networks.” But the foreign fighter issue, isn’t just a local one: Last February, Sweden’s national job agency dismissed its staff of migration resettlement assistants after it began to suspect that some of them were doubling as ISIL recruiters. In late November, Sweden’s prime minister admitted that the country had been “naive” about domestic threats and its foreign fighter problem.

The absence of a law prohibiting people from fighting for armed groups abroad has meant that many people have traveled, fought and returned to Sweden, like Michael Skråmo, a blond Islamic convert from Gothenburg who returned from Syria to late last fall in order to pick up his wife and four children before heading back. One local journalist said that a common joke in the Gothenburg suburbs is that if you live with your parents and want a job and your own apartment, you should go to Syria and fight for half a year, then return to Sweden — the implication being that returning fighters are fast-tracked at the jobs and housing agencies. Yassin Ekhdahl, the committee secretary of the National Center Against Violent Extremism, denied that any such fast-tracking exists but says returning fighters are given “coordinated support” and suggested that they might be “traumatized” and dealing with “stigma, shame and guilt.”

“I think in some groups around Gothenburg, they have this idea that ‘We can do whatever we want, no one can catch us, they can’t sentence us,’” Jankovski said. In December, Sweden concluded its first foreign terrorism case: Hassan al-Mandlawi and Al-Amin Sultan, Swedish nationals from Gothenburg, were sentenced to life in prison for a beheading and a separate murder they allegedly committed while fighting with an ISIL-affiliated group in Syria. The key evidence in the case, pictures and videos saved on a USB stick, were discovered during a drug raid in Gothenburg.

Despite the trial, ISIL’s pull in Sweden has not shown signs of abating. Earlier this month, a known Swedish Islamic fighter from the Gothenburg area who had just been released early from prison was arrested in Greece en route to Syria. In mid-February, five Swedes appeared in an ISIL video announcing the death of 20-year-old Anas Khsassi from Angered. The Swedish paper Expressen reported that his 17-year-old brother, Abdelkarim Khsassi, was killed in 2014 while fighting with ISIL.

Like many other European countries watching their youths run away to join ISIL, Sweden is basically fumbling in the dark for ways to intervene in what is often obliquely described as the radicalization process.

“There are 550,000 people in Gothenburg, and we are the city that has the most ISIL fighters. How come? Because we have different centers of very strong Wahhabi leaders and they work like religious engines,” said Ulf Boström, a middle-aged Swede with twinkling eyes and a mellifluous baritone who left his position as a beat cop in Gothenburg 11 years ago to become Sweden’s only integration police inspector. Now he works in the suburbs and is charged with getting to know the area’s religious leaders, having meaningful conversations with them and stopping problems before they start.

The religious engines to which he referred are the Wahhabi-style religious schools that are heavily concentrated in the northeastern suburbs of Gothenburg — a result of a controversial school voucher program Sweden passed in the early 1990s. The program gave students the option of attending religious and private schools and has been widely blamed for the declining quality of Sweden’s once lauded educational system. In Boström’s office on the second floor of Angered’s podlike police headquarters, Palestinian and Kurdish flags adorned the wall, and a hefty edition of the Quran lay half-buried on his cluttered desk. “The recruiters work 24 hours a day, seven days a week at many places where newcomers and refugees stay and live,” he said.

“I think one of the big problems is that Swedes don’t believe in religion. They think that because they don’t believe in religion, they don’t need to respect religion,” said Faraj, the youth organizer. A peshmerga devotee and a co-author of a novel about the Kurdish-Swedish diaspora, he went with his family to Angered from Kirkuk, Iraq, after the Persian Gulf War. As he walked through a crowded mall in the suburbs, it was clear that he was known and respected, with a number of people pulling him aside to shake hands and chat. In recent years, he has dedicated his time to cataloging and interviewing men and women from Angered who have gone to Syria to fight and live in ISIL territory. “Sweden is open market for recruiting people to ISIL, especially Gothenburg,” he said. “Almost all of the recruits from here were born in Swedish hospitals.” One woman who went on a grim odyssey to ISIL territory before returning home to Gothenburg told him that she was motivated in part by her bad experiences wearing a niqab in Sweden — “people were swearing at her, trying to take it off her head.”

Faraj said that after the Paris attacks and the sentencing of the two Gothenburg men for murder in Syria, somewhat open recruiting has more or less gone silent and has been increasingly hard to penetrate, even for him. “There is no special manual. [People get involved through] social media, friends and relatives who are fighting … There are basement mosques. A lot of people initiate contact with ISIL from their side. Sometimes there are seminars where maybe five guys talk about stuff but not in an open way.” In a similar manner, Boström compared ISIL recruiting to Scientology. “They have their bible at their headquarters, but to read it, you have to be fully in,” he said.