This is a problem that has been ongoing for some time but this summer it has gotten much worse. Gangs in Sweden, which are mostly made up of foreigners, routinely use guns and grenades to attack one another.

‘There have recently been murders and explosions on an unprecedented scale,’ police chief Anders Thornberg told a press conference.

He emphasized that the perpetrators were often from abroad, but he didn’t mention any nationalities.

There have been several shootings in Sweden this week: four in the university city of Uppsala – two of them fatal – and two in Stockholm, where a 13-year-old teenager lost his life.

‘Several boys aged between 13 and 15 have been killed, the mother of a criminal was executed at home, and a young man in Uppsala was shot dead on his way to work’, Thornberg said.

The death of the 13-year-old this week was a new low but this summer two 14-year-olds were also murdered by gangs.

Gang conflict in Sweden has claimed its youngest victim so far. A 13-year-old boy was found dead in a forest in the Swedish municipality of Haninge on Monday, September 11th…

Over the summer, two 14-year-olds, Mohamed Suleiman and Layth Al-Azzawi, were both found dead in the Stockholm region.

The two teens are believed to have resold pistols they had been able to procure from the notorious ‘Kurdish Fox’ gang, led by Rawa Majid, also known as the Kurdish Fox, who fled Sweden and is currently in hiding in Turkey. The two teens were likely then killed by the gang.

The vast majority of those involved in gang crime, much like the Kurdish Fox, come from migration backgrounds. A 2022 report claimed that 85% of the suspects involved in fatal shootings were either born abroad or had at least one foreign-born parent.

This shift of violent crime to younger and younger people is something that we’re seeing here in the US as well. Young offenders are aware that they will not be punished even if they’re caught so there is little incentive for them to stop. Stockholm Police Commissioner Carin Götblad wants to see that change.

Götblad, who has worked in youth crime her entire career, said the age of young people who carried and fired guns was falling.

Overall, crime among young people was going down, she added, but there was a small group who had started getting involved in much more serious crime, particularly teenagers from immigrant backgrounds who lived in overcrowded housing.

“They are fighting about narcotics because it’s worth a lot of money,” Götblad said. “There is a lot of cocaine from South America that comes direct to Sweden, [and then] sold … into Europe. This is what holds the conflicts together.”

A government report published this month, for which Götblad was a contributing expert, suggested children aged 15 to 17 who commit the most serious crimes should be imprisoned. In general, minors aged 15 and above can be sent to young offenders homes, but not prison.

Götblad said: “There needs to be many more corrective tools because we have a naïve society today. The society that our laws are made for and authorities, that doesn’t exist any more.”

Finally, an interesting story was published last week about how the gangs in Sweden are laundering their money. It involves the music streaming service Spotify:

He said his gang began using Spotify for money laundering in 2019, around the time Swedish gangster rap became popular in the country and started winning music awards. “We have paid people who have done this for us systematically,” he said.

Describing the process, he said the gangs would convert their dirty cash to bitcoin, then used the cryptocurrency to pay people who sold fake streams on Spotify, which is a Swedish company. They “made sure we ended up at the top of the charts”, he said, adding that the fake streams also led to an uptick in real streams.

An anonymous investigator working on gang crimes told the paper Svenska Dagbladet, “Spotify has become a bank machine for the gangs.”

These issues have also had a dramatic impact on Swedish politics. This report on Swedish gang violence was produced last year by an Australian broadcaster .