Majid, 38, who was born in Iran, is the leader of the so-called Foxtrot Network, one of the most powerful organized crime gangs in Sweden.
OFAC said it trafficked illegal drugs, and carried out attacks on Israelis and Jews in Europe, on behalf of the Iranian government.
Why have criminals like The Kurdish Fox thrived in Sweden, and why has violent crime, including bombings and shootings, gone up so much in recent years?
Magnus Lindgren, a former police chief in Uppsala county, and general secretary of the Safer Sweden Foundation, told The Epoch Times there were approximately 15,000 “very dangerous criminals” in Sweden, who were divided evenly into biker gangs, football hooligans, and criminals from around 60 high-crime neighborhoods.
The report said the law in Sweden had not kept pace with social developments.
“Criminal policy has long been characterized by ideals of humanism, which originate from the 1970s, with the view that it is society’s fault if crime is committed, not the individual’s,” it stated.
“As a consequence, treatment has come before punishment and non-custodial sanctions before imprisonment.”
Aron Flam, an author and satirist, noted that Sweden had “32 bomb attacks in January alone, 16 killings by guns.”
“That’s quite a lot. It’s one every second day,” he told The Epoch Times.
Flam used the boiling frog analogy to illustrate the situation.
“The water here is boiling, and the frogs are like, oh it’s nice, it’s warm, it’s getting warmer. But, you know, it’s still not scalding. That will continue until you know the water is boiling over,” he said.
Teenage Hitmen and ‘Way Too Lax’ Laws
Hugo Kaaman, a researcher monitoring Sweden’s gang violence, told The Epoch Times, organized crime in Sweden was “out of control” and he said young teenagers were being hired anonymously to carry out murders and other crimes.“Most of the people ordering hits are hiding abroad and actively advertise the opportunity to kill someone on social media for $5,000–$20,000 and there’s even young kids willing to do it for free, just for the clout,” Kaaman said.
Kaaman said: “Police chiefs like to make a big deal out of saying ‘we stemmed the violence’ as soon as intense periods calm down, but it never lasts. The justice system doesn’t sentence enough, and the sentencing guidelines are way too lax.”
He said there were too few police officers and he said they were “being actively infiltrated by gangs.”
Crime was a huge issue in the 2022 election in Sweden, which led to the Social Democrat Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson leaving office.
In May 2022, three young men had been shot dead in eight days in a small neighborhood in the town of Orebro.
It was one of the 60 neighborhoods in Sweden with large immigrant communities, which are listed by police as risk areas for rising gang violence.
In June 2022 the right-wing, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats had tabled a vote of no confidence in the then Justice Minister Morgan Johansson.
Johansson’s stance, Flam said, was that the shootings are “okay because they don’t shoot anyone who’s not a gangster.”
“Basically, that was his argument not to do anything about them. But a few years after he said that two people got hit on a playground,” Flam said.
He was referring to an August 2022 shooting in a playground in Eskilstuna, a small town near Stockholm, in which a mother and her 5-year-old son were injured.
He was then assassinated, in a crime that remains unsolved.
Immigration
Many on the left said poverty and other issues within immigrant communities led to crimes.Lindgren said such an interpretation is insulting to the residents.
“It’s a huge insult for all the other people living there to make this a question about poverty,” he said.
“Ninety percent of the people living there are good people, and want exactly the same as you and me.”
Flam, who is Jewish, said he grew up in a “sleepy suburb” of Stockholm with many Serbian and Bosnian immigrants.
He said things started to change in the late 1980s and early 1990s when more North Africans and Arabs arrived.
“They didn’t like Jews, and it was obvious that this wave of immigration was different,” Flam said.
In the mid-1980s there were around 600,000 immigrants per year coming to Sweden.
Many of those immigrants who arrived in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s have struggled to integrate or have found themselves drawn into organized crime.
Majid—who is of Iraqi Kurdish origin and was born in Iran and grew up in the town of Uppsala in central Sweden—and his family were among those waves of immigrants.
After creating the Foxtrot Network, Majid left Sweden in 2018 and moved to Turkey, although he retains close links with the Iranian government.
OFAC said on March 12, “In January 2024, the Foxtrot Network orchestrated an attack on the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, on behalf of the government of Iran.”
Flam said Iran had used criminals to try to assassinate several prominent Swedish Jews, including activist Saskia Pantell, who has now emigrated to Israel, and Aron Verständig, the chairman of the Judiska Centralrådet (Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities).
Iran, and Majid’s Foxtrot Network, have already fallen under suspicion for the murder. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said at the time: “There is obviously a risk that there is a connection to a foreign power.”
Kaaman said Foxtrot is “a wholesale smuggling and distribution network that has direct connections and alliances with smaller gangs in the Swedish cities where they operate.”
Foxtrot versus Rumba
One of Majid’s rivals in the Swedish underworld is Ismail Abdo, known as Strawberry because of his penchant for laundering money on roadside stalls selling fresh fruit.His drug gang network is known as Rumba.
Majid allegedly hired a hitman to kill Abdo’s mother, in Uppsala, in September 2023.
Turkish media reported Abdo was captured in the city of Adana last year, based on an Interpol red notice, before he was released on bail.
Several high-profile murders of rappers in Sweden are also a reflection of a thriving rap culture that’s often linked to criminality.
In October 2021, 19-year-old Nils Kurt Erik Einar Gronberg—a rapper better known as Einar—was shot dead in a suburb of Stockholm. Einar’s song lyrics often mentioned crime, drugs, and weapons.
Then in June 2024 Karar Ali Salem Ramadan, a rapper who used the stage name C. Gambino, was shot dead in a parking garage in Gothenburg.
Most dramatically of all, on Dec. 19, 2024, 23-year-old rapper Gaboro—real name Ninos Khouri—was shot dead in Norrkoping, by a gunman who allegedly livestreamed the killing.
So what is the prognosis for Sweden?
However, “the authorities are likely to struggle to substantially contain gangs in 2025,” it stated.
“The government made this a ‘priority’ over the past year. It has deported some dual-citizen criminals and proposed allowing the police to wiretap gang-linked minors,” it said.
“Such actions, combined with heightened security operations, will probably lead to some improvement this year.”
The assessment noted that it has been difficult for police to prosecute cases and apprehend suspects “because several gang leaders live abroad, such as in Turkey which reportedly refuses extradition.”
The Sweden Democrats, who were most vocal about crime and immigration prior to the 2022 election, have propped up the coalition government of Ulf Kristersson in a confidence and supply agreement.
Flam said the strategy of the Sweden Democrats was originally to change the system from within before they appeared to have lost their way.
“Like most forces like that, they got changed by the system, so people are losing faith in them at the same time as more Swedes are sort of waking up ... and seeing problems,” he said.
Kaaman said reform is long overdue.
“If you really wanted to solve the issues we face now you’d have to have implemented radical changes to the system 10–20 years ago, not minor edits along the way now. Even then, there’s no political will to do what’s actually needed,” he said.
