In Sweden, Iran’s proxies recruit criminals and minors to threaten Israelis, Jews
IRGC threats in the Nordic country have skyrocketed since Oct. 7, 2023, with some nearly succeeding — including an attempted bombing outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm
STOCKHOLM, Sweden — The first noticeable thing about Aron Verständig was that he arrived without a security detail. For a man who was the target of a murder plot by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, walking around without bodyguards could appear almost reckless. But the bespectacled chairman of the Judiska Centralrådet, or the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities, has taken it in stride.
Granted, the Iranian agents who were planning his murder were arrested and deported, but the regime has a long memory and is unforgiving.
Many in Sweden are already pointing fingers at Tehran for last week’s murder of Islam critic and Quran burner Salwan Momika in Södertälje, a suburb southwest of the capital, Stockholm. And even though Verständig is not the subject of a fatwa — a religious bounty like the one that hung over author Salman Rushdie for decades before a 2022 attempt on his life in upstate New York left him blind in one eye — his lack of security seems cavalier at least.
Asked how it feels to be a target of a known state sponsor of terror, Verständig shrugged and answered with what could be described as typically cool Swedish sarcasm: “It did bother me a bit when they told me about it.” That was in 2021, but it took another three years before the affair finally became more widely known via a podcast by Swedish national radio journalist Daniel Öhman.
It’s not as if the threat from Iran has diminished in Sweden since then, as the murder of Momika shows. On the contrary, other incidents and attacks in the past year suggest that, if anything, the IRGC has stepped up its terror activities in the Nordic country, including against Jewish and Israeli targets.
One of its methods is to recruit criminal gangs — and even minors — from the large immigrant community and roughly 800,000-strong Muslim community.
This happens not just in Sweden but throughout Western Europe. Opposition activists in the Persian diaspora are targeted by the regime in Tehran, as are Israeli and Jewish institutions and individuals. In 2015 and 2017, two Iranians were murdered by criminals in the Dutch cities of Almere and The Hague. All evidence points to it being done at the behest of the regime in Tehran. Germany, France and the United Kingdom have all reported the same phenomenon.
At the end of May 2024, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that Israel’s Mossad had informed its Swedish counterpart Säpo — short for Säkerhetspolisen, or security police — that Rawa Majid, the infamous leader of the greatest criminal network in the country, is now working for Iran. Majid fled Sweden in 2018 and was apprehended by Iranian police in 2023. According to the Mossad, the Islamic Republic will shelter Majid, also known as the Kurdish Fox, as long as he puts his gang members at the IRGC’s disposal for terror purposes.
Majid’s so-called Foxtrot network is said to be recruiting minors for terror attacks, as anyone under 15 years of age can’t be prosecuted under Swedish law. The minimum age of criminal responsibility is higher in Sweden than in most Western European countries.
The IRGC’s 2021 murder plot was aimed at two other Swedish Jews along with Verständig — one of whom was also a US citizen, which meant the FBI joined the investigation. The two Iranian agents, later identified as Mahdi Ramezani and Fereshteh Sanaeifarid, had entered Sweden in 2015 by posing as refugees from Afghanistan. Two years later, they were officially granted asylum. The two IRGC agents probably started targeting Swedish Jews because more obvious targets such as the Israeli embassy in Stockholm and its employees, were too well-protected.
They were unmasked in 2021 and deported after eight months in custody.
“There wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them,” journalist Daniel Öhman told The Times of Israel.
To minimize the threat to the potential victims, Swedish police stepped in before the Iranians’ assassination plan reached its final stage.
“Besides,” said Öhman, “part of the evidence couldn’t be used because it came from a different country.”
Asked whether that country might be Israel, Öhman answers, “It was a friendly country, and it wasn’t the US.” When pressed on the point, he smiles: “We have no confirmation, but it could be Israel.”
The affair was an embarrassment for the Swedish authorities. Öhman and his colleagues discovered that in 2016, the national immigration service Migrationsverket had received two anonymous tips that “Foad Malkshahi,” as Ramezani called himself, was a potentially dangerous IRGC agent. Furthermore, the Afghan passports the two Iranians used were obvious forgeries, said Öhman. To top it off, a language analysis by the immigration service itself had aroused doubts about their Afghan identities: their accents were off. Still, the two IRGC agents were granted asylum.
It is hardly surprising that Swedish authorities tried to cover up the case after they had informed the potential victims. They succeeded until Öhman and his team discovered the truth last year.
Is there a chance more Iranian agents have entered Sweden by similar methods? Is it possible the migration services have repeated their mistakes?
When reached for comment, a Säpo spokesperson told The Times of Israel they were “unable to speak about operational matters due to secrecy.”
“[The IRGC agents] entered during a wave of mass immigration; it was extremely easy to enter the country back then. Times have changed since, but of course you can’t exclude anything,” said Öhman.
The authorities cannot guarantee anybody’s safety
Times may have changed, but not necessarily for the better for the Jewish community in Sweden. The number of violent threats aimed at Jews and the roughly 20,000 Israelis living in Sweden has exploded since the Hamas-led terror onslaught of October 7, 2023.
And not just threats. In February last year, a “dangerous object” was blown up outside the Israeli embassy in Nobel Park, just to the northeast of Stockholm’s city center. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson called it an “attempted bombing.”
In May, a 15-year-old was arrested on his way to the embassy carrying a handgun. That same night, the police apprehended a 14-year-old after shots were fired near the embassy. These incidents seem to confirm suspicions that criminal gangs specifically recruit minors at the behest of the IRGC. On October 10, shots were also fired at a branch of Israeli defense contractor Elbit in the southern city of Gothenburg.
The Mossad allegedly informed Säpo not only that Foxtrot leader Majid was recruited by the Islamic Republic but that Majid’s former right-hand man and current rival Ismail Abdo also put his Rumba crime network at the regime’s disposal. As such, Alireza Akhondi, a Swedish parliamentarian who was born in the Iranian city of Isfahan, doubts that Majid is being coerced into working for the IRGC.
“It’s a 100 percent voluntary cooperation,” said Akhondi in an interview with the Emirati newspaper The National. “We know that the IRGC controls the narcotics groups inside Iran, so using criminals like Rawa Majid, who is wanted for massive drug dealing in Sweden, makes a lot of sense.”
Competing criminal networks Foxtrot and Rumbo have been fighting each other in a bloody gang war over control of the Swedish drug trade. In the same interview, Akhondi spoke of his fear of being targeted as an opponent of the Tehran regime. Last week’s assassination of Momika proves that the authorities cannot guarantee anybody’s safety, which was all but acknowledged by Kristersson.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Iranians are not done with Sweden, despite the expulsion of their IRGC agents in 2021 — especially since Iran’s military was humiliated by Israel several times over in the last year, including with the July assassination in Tehran of Hamas head Ismail Haniyeh; the IAF’s reprisal bombings after an ineffective direct ballistic missile attack, which left the Islamic regime virtually bereft of air defenses; Hezbollah’s defeat in southern Lebanon; and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Iran desperately needs a win, and a successful terror attack against a Jewish target in Europe would be presented as such by Tehran.
In light of this, Verständig’s cavalier attitude to the risk of such an attack is all the more surprising.
“This may sound strange to you,” he said, “but I’ve been living in this situation for so long now, I’m getting used to it. I’m honestly more worried about our community. After the failed attacks against the embassy, the terrorists might go after softer targets. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s something we definitely need to take into account and prepare for.”
