A child gunman in the brutal rise of deadly gangland warfare in Sweden has told The National of his pride when the Kurdish leader of his gang messaged his approval from Iran.
The 16-year-old reveals how the man known as the Kurdish Fox is close to his teenage killers despite years of exile. Sitting in the back of a car on the way to an underground interview point, Alan smiles as he talks nonchalantly about the buzz he got from shooting his rival criminals.
“It’s fun. It's crazy for the first two hours when you have done it, then you start to run because you don’t want the police to see you,” he told The National.
He is one of hundreds of teenagers in Sweden who enlisted in one of the two rival gangs that have gained notoriety for their role in the spate of violent deaths that has blighted the country over the past decade.
Gangsters such as those in the Foxtrot network, run by Rawa Majid, known as the Kurdish Fox, have recruited children to attack rivals - with the knowledge that under Swedish law, anyone under the age of 15 cannot be prosecuted.
Alan revealed how at one point his criminal abilities and ruthlessness came to the attention of Rawa Majid himself. “I heard he liked me,” he told The National with a grin. Along with the praise from the boss, came a Fox Ring - a piece of jewellery with the design of a fox wearing a jacket given to members of the network as a reward for their loyalty. As happy as he was he decided it was time to take a step back. “I declined it. I said ‘Listen, I'm dropping out now’.”
Alan, not his real name, like many Swedish teenagers has excellent English learned from the chatroom banter of online gaming platforms. It is not a world so dissimilar to the reality on the path that took him into Foxtrot's network. Looking back he is quite open - when talking anonymously - about the ebbs and adrenaline rushes as he carried out shootings and dealt drugs, starting when he was a pre-teen.
Where it all began is not so far from Growing up in the Scandinavian suburbs, Alan found himself being bullied at school and a familiar route to escape his troubles seemed appealing.
“I was the only immigrant but some of the older guys took care of me because they saw money was a problem [for me],” he said.
“In the beginning, they just gave me money. Then, when I was older, I started to make my own money through their connections. At first, I was selling drugs: cocaine and hash.”
He said his potential was spotted by the “elders” from the Foxtrot network in the area of Sweden, where he lived.
“I began making my own contacts from people who wanted to buy from me," he said. “I started to make more money than others. Then one of the elders saw something in me. They said they saw I have potential. I was so focused on money."
The elders he refers to are "still in Foxtrot”, he says, though who they are “is something I can’t say”.
Sweden has been transformed into the deadliest place in Europe for young men. Last year, firearms were used in 45 recorded cases of deadly violence, almost half of the total number of fatalities as a result of homicides. In the cases where a firearm was used last year, the victim was a male in 40 cases, leaving five cases in which the victim was a female.
Two-thirds of the confirmed cases of lethal violence reported last year took place in the major metropolitan police regions around the cities of Stockholm, Gothenberg, Malmo and Uppsala. This level has fluctuated between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total during the years from 2014 to last year.
Alan had a key role in feeding the gang's conveyor belt of killings, taking on the task of finding other children who would be willing to carry out shootings for the network and to deal drugs.
“They told me ‘can you blow somebody's house up, or one of your kids? Or can you [find] more kids to deal for us?’ I even met somebody who wanted to kill somebody. So I sent that kid to the elders, and they did their thing with him,” he said.
“They started to give me guns and killing orders. I was the kid who always fixed other kids. They know I'm just gonna fix it on my own, I can fix one kid to this, like, blow out somebody's house or something.
“I have to defend my name and my status. I need to do something,” he said. When there was an attack his initial rush of adrenaline lasted about two hours.
Very early on in Alan's career, his orders were given through the EncroChat application used by criminals, but it was hacked by law enforcement in 2021. The operation resulted in three in every five prosecutions in Sweden using evidence from the network server by 2023. The gang began using Signal after that to conduct their communications. Now the preferred format is Telegram.
For organising a shooting, he said he received about 40,000 to 50,000 Swedish kronor ($4,300 to $5,375). The child gunmen would be paid anywhere from 200,000 kronor ($21,000) upwards for carrying out the deed.
“I don't care if guys put a price on him and he needs to be killed, you know. That's not my problem.”
The child shooters were recruited through Telegram using a VPN that allowed Alan to disguise his location from the police.
One of the reasons for the violence is that the Foxtrot network has a rival in the Rumba organisation. Majid the Kurdish Fox has escaped to Iran where the US government has accused the authorities of offering him protection. The Rumba boss Ismail ‘Strawberry’ Abdo is locked up in an Istanbul prison having become a pawn in Turkish/Swedish relations. The two men fell out over a luxury villa in the town of Bodrum, leading to the deadly feud that has raged across Swedish cities.
Court papers show an injunction was placed on a 1.7 million euro property sold by Majid to Abdo in 2022. Soon after the violence in Sweden's suburbs spiralled.
At its worst, the gangs have offered 'violence as a service' to underground bidders, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, prompting the US sanctions. Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, has set up a task force to deal with the problem within its member states.
Social media platforms and messaging apps are used to reach young people through coded language and memes. Some of the tasks are made to look like those in a video game.
As well as organising shootings, Alan said he was permitted to carry out his own drug dealing, which involved taking care of his rivals - though he insists he has never personally killed anyone.
Deeply loyal
The legend of the Kurdish Fox is deeply rooted in Majid’s backstory as an immigrant who was able to command fear and respect. “Everybody thinks he's a model. Everybody wants to be him. We can go now to a neighbourhood and say 'Do you want to be like him?’ and they say ‘I want to be bigger’.
“They see he didn't start with anything. Now he's the biggest person we know on the news. He’s almost like Pablo Escobar. That's the mindset people see him.”
Ultimately having spurned the crime boss ring, Alan’s involvement with the Foxtrot network came to an end when he started getting careless and was arrested by police. He had a gun and cocaine on him.
“It was my fault. I was out late. I was coming home at seven in the morning.
“They said they had been following me for a long time but they couldn't prove the gun was mine. They then took me in for narcotics possession.”
Despite the efforts of authorities to turn his life around, he admits he is still dealing drugs, which he demonstrated by showing the Telegram channel he uses for his business and taking phone calls in which he took orders for his offerings.
As becomes clear, when he is on the streets he is always scanning for opportunities. “I’m active in this area,” he says proudly as we drive to drop him off.
Rissa Seidou, a police inspector based in the Rinkeby area north of Stockholm, knows many teenagers like Alan and has seen the impact of gang violence at close quarters.
The suburb has seen many children recruited to carry out shootings and explosions to fuel Majid’s ambitions. Expanding his drug-dealing activity means using his powerful reputation in migrant areas to recruit.
“I think everything started because he wanted to invade an area to make it his base for drug dealing and build up a kind of mafia structure," she told The National. “He has cars, watches and the youth think ‘this is the easy money life I want to live’. I mean, it's the same thing as being recruited to an extremist group. There is no difference. So they have been brainwashed.”
Criminals based in different countries who may never meet each other use messaging apps to recruit children to commit crimes.
“We can see when they put out an announcement that they are looking for someone to maybe blow up the door or something. They put it like they’re advertising for a service," said Inspector Seidou. “Maybe the recruiter is not sitting here in Sweden. He might be in Iraq and he needs to order a shooting in Stockholm,” she told The National in her office in a neighbourhood police station.
“But he finds a recruiter in Spain and the recruiter finds the person who's going to commit a crime here in Stockholm. Then the young person who has committed the crime needs to film it live to prove that he did the work.”
As well as money, the children who carry out crimes also crave the status that comes with their actions, which includes bragging about it in videos accompanied by a rap soundtrack.
Some of the young criminals she has encountered appear to have little idea of the consequences.
Inspector Seidou explained that it is common for the children to take the drug tramadol, a powerful opiate that can produce feelings of euphoria, relaxation and sedation.
“I met a 13-year-old boy and the first question he asked me was ‘Can I go home to my mom after this?' Most of them don’t even understand."
In the eruption of gang warfare that followed the murder of Ismail Abdo’s mother on the orders of Majid and the attempts at retaliation, “the game became more dangerous”.
Each since “wants to show more strength”, which has resulted in the use of homemade grenades known as a thermos. These are made by stuffing plastic explosives into thermos flasks that are then detonated at their target.
Jacob Fraiman sees what happens when teenagers like Alan end up in the criminal justice system through his work with the Ankarstiftelsen rehabilitation project. He came to Sweden from Chile when he was seven but ended up being sucked into a life of crime and was in and out of prison from 2003 to 2015. Now with Ankarstiftelsen he works with young people.
In his day, young criminals were interested in “cars, maybe gold chains and watches” but these days they are interested in their status on TikTok.
Mr Fraiman said initially some of the children “play tough but when you're alone with them, they cry” - having realised the situation they’ve placed themselves in. Often they have nightmares, he added.
Others seem unable to face up to what they have done and talk about themselves in the third person.
“Sometimes they come in and tell me about a murder and they say ‘he saw him, he killed the person’ like it’s not them,” said Mr Fraiman. “I've seen a lot of people who have got all that we have helped. They have had a good life after but many of these people already have someone who wants to kill them.”
