The menace of IS has been increasing; not just in Europe, but the rest of the world too. This year, there has been a growing number of thwarted plots and threats that are reaching Islamic State networks in Africa. One especially vulnerable European country to this occurring African threat is Sweden. The far-off IS unit in Somalia (IS-S) is targeting existing and potentially radical features of Sweden’s Somali diaspora, the length of which has swelled in recent years.
IS-S has been connected to a growing number of connected actions, arrests, and at least one attack. Despite Denmark’s decision last year to prohibit burnings of the Quran, Sweden is still granting licences for public burnings of the Islamic text. The most current burning took place in May ahead of the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo. After this, and several burnings last year, the Swedish administration is on high alert for terror attacks.
Sweden’s immigration issues, and the social instability that has been observed, are well documented. Over the past two decades, immigration levels have skyrocketed, with a significant spike in 2015 when it took in 163,000 refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Since the bend of the century, the number of people in Sweden born abroad has doubled to two million, around a fifth of the population. In 2022, then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson condemned a lack of integration and the most elevated per capita immigration in Europe for rising fierce gang crime, claiming that “segregation has been permitted to go so far that we have parallel associations in Sweden. We live in the same homeland but in completely different realities.”
In recent months, the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) has produced a string of arrests as it functions to dismantle an IS-S web in the municipality of Tyresö, south of the capital Stockholm. In March, four members of the network were charged with “terrorist offences” and involvement in “violent Islamist extremism”. On 17 April, Säpo’s counter-terrorism examination led the association to a 60-year-old imam with deep origins in the community who has led a mosque since 2000. The case persisted to develop in late May when a 20-year-old known gang member and friend to one of the suspects charged in March was raided in contact with a shooting at the Israeli embassy. During that time, it was also announced that there has been a marked growth in people endeavouring to travel and join IS branches in Africa.
Sweden is rising as the primary IS-S hub in Europe, and connected incidents are on the rise. Notably, Abdul Qadir Mumin, the department founder and one of its directors lived in Sweden for several years, later migrating to the UK where he became a citizen. Mumin then flew to Somalia after MI5 started probing his involvement in the radicalisation of young men. Michael Adebolajo, who moved on to decapitate British soldier Lee Rigby at a military barracks in southeast London in 2013, observed the mosque at which Mumin delivered sermons in the British capital. With IS-S holding expanded territorial control over mountainous areas in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region and its expanded authority within the global Islamic State network, there is a real danger that it could use this as a staging site for external operations in the West. From here, it could direct, guide, and promote its networks and supporters in Sweden and beyond. Sweden will persist to be a European focal point for IS-S steps as the group aims directly at the West.
