Sweden’s prime minister is preparing to deploy the military in the struggle against gang crime after three people were killed by shootings and an explosion in the space of 12 hours.
The country has been racked with gun violence as criminal networks increasingly hire young teenagers to carry out contract killings because they receive more lenient sentences if they are convicted.
Since the start of September there have been 11 deaths from shootings or bombings, a monthly record. On Wednesday alone two young men were shot dead in the suburbs of Stockholm and a 25-year-old woman died from the injuries inflicted by a bomb blast near the university city of Uppsala.
The woman was the seventh innocent bystander to have been killed in the crossfire of the conflicts over the past 12 months. Last week a man in his seventies died after being struck by a stray bullet outside a bar in Sandviken, a small town on the east coast.
“Sweden has never seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this,” Ulf Kristersson, the Swedish prime minister, said in a televised speech to the nation. “We will hunt the gangs down and we will defeat them.”
A decade ago Sweden was among the ten safest countries in the world, according to the annual Global Peace Index compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace in Australia.
However, a spiralling number of shootings have seen the country plummet to 28th place, behind Slovakia and Latvia, as gangs, often with international links, vie for control of the drugs trade. By some estimates Sweden now has more fatal shootings per head than any other European Union country.
“Sadly there is not much to suggest that this brutal violence will stop soon,” said Anders Thornberg, the head of Sweden’s national police.
“Our assessment is that there will probably be fresh incidents of violence before the tide turns. This is an unprecedented level of acts of terrorism-like violence. It’s not just one line that’s been crossed; it’s several.”
It remains to be seen exactly what role the military will play in tackling the problem. There are suggestions that it could provide surveillance systems, vehicles and possibly intelligence analysis.
Much of the current wave of violence has been traced back to a kingpin called Rawa Majid, nicknamed the “Kurdish Fox”, who was raised in Sweden by Iraqi parents but is now running the country’s most brutal gang from exile in Turkey.
A schism in Majid’s gang, known as Foxtrot, has led to an escalating cycle of reprisals between the two factions. This has coincided with an elaborate tangle of parallel conflicts between smaller gangs, particularly on the fringes of Stockholm.
Like Majid, the gunmen are typically first or second-generation immigrants, who often grow up in the crime-ridden suburbs of Sweden’s larger cities, with little sense of having a stake in mainstream society.
Kristersson said the country’s laws had not been designed to cope with “child soldiers”, boys as young as 13 or 14 who are recruited by the gangs as freelance killers. He also blamed the previous centre-left government’s relaxed approach to asylum and multiculturalism.
During the 2015-16 migration crisis Sweden took in more irregular immigrants relative to its size than any other European state. About a fifth of its 10.5 million people were born overseas. “It is an irresponsible immigration policy and a failed integration that have brought us to this point,” Kristersson said.
His right-wing coalition, which depends on the support of the hard-right Sweden Democrats, has set out proposals to increase the rate at which rejected asylum seekers are deported, oblige immigrants to make more effort to integrate into Swedish society and impose significantly tougher sentences on gang members.
Sweden has also raised its terrorism threat level to the second-highest category after outrage in many parts of the Islamic world at the repeated desecrations of copies of the Quran on Swedish soil.
