Some 14 months into Israel’s devastating response to the deadly October 2023 attacks by Hamas, the Islamic Republic’s militant allies — including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria’s ousted President Bashar al-Assad — have been severely weakened or washed away.
Yet crippling a network that’s defined Iran’s regional policy for almost half a century hasn’t lessened the threat of Iranian-backed attacks in Europe, according to a senior European official who follows the issue.
While some of the young people are motivated by frustration at what they see as Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, others are simply driven by money and sometimes the young perpetrators have no idea what they are signing up for. If they are under 15, they can’t be prosecuted in either Sweden or Norway.
“There are cases where the proxies aren’t aware or don’t realize that they are acting on behalf of a foreign power,” the Swedish Security Service said in a statement earlier this year.
The boy who targeted the Israelis in Stockholm in May didn’t know where the embassy was when the taxi picked him up, according to police reports. He had to call someone else to ask for the address when the driver asked where they were going. Police had been tracking his movements and stopped the cab before he reached his destination.
On October 1, Swedish police rushed to the same embassy building after shots were reported, but they arrived too late to catch the perpetrator. Police reports put the suspect on a southbound train to Copenhagen, which later that night was rocked by two loud explosions close to Israel’s mission in the Danish capital. Security officials said they believed the man was also recruited by Iran.
The 16-year-old who attacked Elbit Systems this May used two thermos flasks packed with explosives and was charged alongside a 23-year-old accomplice. While the investigation was unable to uncover who gave them instructions or transferred money to them, the prosecutor in the case said it seemed clear they were acting on behalf of someone else.
For years, Sweden has been struggling with the increasing presence of organised crime gangs which seek to recruit youngsters from its immigrant communities.
Over 1.5 million people have moved to the country since 1980 and now around 20 per cent of the population were born outside of the country. But many struggle to assimilate.
In a recent survey, 40 per cent of migrants said they do not feel integrated into Swedish society. The dwindling welfare state and much higher poverty rates in immigrant neighbourhoods make recruitment easier for criminal gangs and, increasingly, hostile actors like Iran.
Now there are concerns in Norway that those problems are spreading across the 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometre) open border that separates the two countries. Warnings about “Swedish conditions” have become commonplace in the political debate in Oslo where officials are starting to see the same patterns that have taken hold in Sweden and Denmark.
In Sweden, the mounting alarm over immigration and public safety has helped fuel support for the far-right Sweden Democrats, the second-largest party in parliament and a key backer of conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s minority government. With the help of the far-right, Kristersson has introduced youth prisons for children under 15.
Norway faces its own elections in less than a year and Social-Democratic Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store has prioritised youth crime, promising stricter handling of the most serious offences. The far-right opposition Progress Party, which is leading in the polls, wants to go further and, following the Swedish approach, make it possible to lock up 15-year-olds.
Bloomberg