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The pattern is discernable in many Western European countries that have seen large-scale migration from Africa and the Middle East. The overrepresentation of immigrants from certain backgrounds is a staple of nationalist rhetoric, and drives right-wing parties that challenge the status quo on immigration. Just recently it was written in The Conservative about how a study confirms the overrepresentation of migrants in rape and other sexual crimes, in Sweden.
While Sweden used to be lambasted for the prevalence of migrant-related sex crimes, in more recent years the violent nature of organised crime in the country has become the talk of Europe instead. In January alone, 32 different bombings took place around the country, but primarily in the capital city of Stockholm. This tops the preceding December, which saw 27 different incidents, according to public service broadcaster SVT’s statistics. Before that, the high number of deadly shootings in the country was the source of much terror. The number of victims killed in gang-related shootings in Sweden in a year topped in 2022, at 62 casualties, also according to SVT’s data.
As can be inferred from what we know about migrant-related crime in Europe, the background of the perpetrators of gang violence in Sweden is predominantly, if not exclusively, foreign. This has made it largely uncomplicated for nationalist and anti-immigration parties to point to migration as the source of, if not all, at least the most egregious forms of crimes in their countries.
A phenomenon that can be observed in Sweden is however the increased confluence of the immigrant criminal environment with the native Swedish criminal environment. The native criminal organisations, generally consisting of motorcycle clubs, have found themselves increasingly in conflict with the immigrated criminal networks over territory and influence. As the dynamics of organised crime go, this also leads rivalling native Swedish criminals into the folds of immigrant gangs, and vice versa. Increasingly, the identities of the different criminal groupings in the country, commonly separated by national and cultural backgrounds, are getting blurred.
A couple of examples from Sweden is that the Danish-Swedish criminal motorcycle club Comanches is believed to be engaged in a conflict with a group connected to the network of Ismail Abdo, a notorious kingpin of Iraqi origin who is considered the largest current leading profile in the immigrant criminal milieu in Sweden. This point of contact between the native and the immigrated criminal realm, situated near the core of the gang wars, has driven rival factions within the immigrant gangs into the ranks of the motorcycle clubs. In Denmark many members of the Comanches reportedly have backgrounds in immigrant gangs, according to Danish police.
Another oddity is the case of Alfred Wennberg, a Swedish criminal who became known as the bombmaker of Foxtrot, a network of immigrant gangs led by the infamous “Kurdish Fox”, Rawa Majid. The high profile of his case, being involved in a bombing against a gangster rap artist in 2023, raised questions about the immigrant-dominated gangs truly only attracting people with an immigrant background.
There are a number of other cases involving Swedish youths perpetrating assassination or intimidation attempts on behalf of criminal gangs, often in exchange for monetary rewards, but sometimes under threat of violence. As one who has regularly dug into hot criminal cases through court documents, I can observe that Swedish names are not necessarily a rarity among the indicted anymore.
One explanation behind the increased confluence of native and immigrated criminal culture is the momentum that the migration-derived criminality has attained after decades of being insufficiently addressed by the political establishment. This has given the immigrated networks economic advantages that allows them to gradually attract even natives with criminal tendencies, who usually rarely associate with gang culture. On top of this, the utmost violent activities of the immigrated gangs has raised the stakes for the native gangs, who in turn too must embrace more violent methods, which they previously generally abstained from. Thus, when the landscape of criminal organisations is homogenised, there will of course be more intermingling over cultural borders.
The severe criminality that is ascribed to mass migration risks, if it continues to go unaddressed, becoming so embedded into the wider society that it ceases to be solved as merely a bi-product of uncontrolled migration. This is an interesting development that may have consequences for the advantage that conservatives has had for many years, which has been pointing at the apparent connection between immigration and violent crime.