The Kurdish Fox and the Strawberry

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G'day, I'm Matt Bevan.

This is If You're Listening.

So in the process of researching our last episode on the anti-Semitic attacks both in Australia and around the world that are apparently being coordinated and financed by Iran, I spent a great deal of time in an unlikely place, Swedish TikTok.

I was drawn there by a meme that was extremely popular in late 2023.

It's an audio clip of a Swedish gang leader seemingly telling someone to stay away from the city of Strangnes.

When you don't understand the language, it's hard to understand why these jokes seem to really land.

So to figure out why these jokes are funny, I've got in contact with the Swedish crime reporter who broke the story and released this now apparently iconic audio to the public.

Kim Mumgrain writes for the Swedish newspaper Expressen and hosts the weekly Swedish language true crime podcast Krim Rummit.

As the man who is in many ways responsible for this TikTok trend, he is the perfect person to help me understand it.

G'day, Kim.

G'day.

Happy to be here.

I'm delighted that you're here, Kim.

This is a terrible stereotype, but I was wondering what crime there is in Sweden.

I was like, are we talking about police crackdowns on incorrectly assembled furniture or unlicensed saunas?

heists of herrings.

But it turns out there is a lot of crime going on, particularly in Sweden, isn't there?

I think there's still an old picture of what Sweden is basically Ike and small cottages and everyone's blonde and blue-eyed and happy.

However, crime has been rampant for maybe the past five, ten, fifteen years, basically topping the news for the past few years with shootings and detonations and gang violence, changing Sweden from being basically one of the most peaceful countries in the European Union in terms of gun crime to being one of the worst.

I actually spent a bit of time having a look at some crime data from Sweden that your government government has been putting out.

It's an extraordinary change in the types of violent crime that you're seeing.

Sort of about 15 years ago, the largest numbers of homicides were by methods other than by firearms against men, homicides by methods other than firearms against women.

And now male firearm deaths are the leading cause of violent death in Sweden.

It's a total shift in terms of of the type of crime and the type of murders that you are seeing in Sweden.

It's extraordinary.

Is it all down to criminal groups or is there something more to it?

I would say so, yes.

What we're seeing are these young men shooting each other to death as part of criminal gangs clashing with each other.

For the past, I would say, two, three, four years, you see hitmen for hire, hit men who are maybe 13, 14, 15 years old.

Hit children even.

Hit children, absolutely.

We started calling them child soldiers, actually.

I refrained from doing that for quite a number of years because I thought the term was too dramatic and it didn't really reflect what we were seeing.

But I changed, and that's what I call them now because that's how it works.

I want to talk about this guy that is in this meme, the Kurdish fox.

We talked about him a bit in our episode last week.

What we're seeing on these clips is the Kurdish fox who sort of became the poster boy for a Swedish gang crime, sort of the kingpin of the Swedish gang world for the past few years.

And I actually broke a story, I think it was 2023,

where we could actually hear his voice properly for the first time and in a criminal context where he was actually threatening people to stay away from strangeness.

Which is a small town in the middle of Sweden, not in any way connected to gang crime in the public conscience.

But I got this from a police investigation actually when they were starting to build a case against him.

We released it to show people who this man is.

And first of all, there was great interest in the story, but it also kind of quickly grew to some cultural phenomenon where you would see yoga moms or kids on TikTok using it as a TikTok trend, joking around,

which I wasn't really prepared for.

But I guess it sort of proves how this issue has really taken place into your everyday Swedes conscience.

So people...

for some reason were connected with this particular clip as some sort of a cultural thing.

Do you know why?

I just kept staring at it and trying to get what was funny about it.

I guess it's very TikTok-friendly in the sense that it's very dramatic.

He's obviously upset because someone has been trying to apply pressure on his drug dealers and strengthnas, and he leaves little to the imagination of what he's going to do if people don't adhere to his instructions.

He's saying he's going to blow up every house, he's going to shoot everyone in the head if they're not listening.

If he hears one more thing, it's going to be Nurals, which is essentially the Kurdish New Year.

So it's going to be fireworks and it's all very dramatic.

So I think what people did jokingly was to apply this very angry man to somewhat everyday situations that they found themselves upset with.

And the joke being, I'm so extremely upset over this pretty mundane situation.

Right.

So stay away from my office coffee stash or stay away from something that is mine.

That's the sort of the running joke.

I see.

Exactly.

If you have something in the office fridge at work, you best not touch it.

Okay, I see.

I see.

Otherwise, there will be terrible consequences along the lines of the things that the Kurdish fox can deliver.

Exactly.

Okay, there you go.

You've explained a cross-language joke to me.

Very well done.

You know, this gang war appears to be based around this guy, the Kurdish fox, and his former ally turned enemy who goes by the strawberry.

In Swedish, do these names sound more threatening?

Because they are very silly names in English.

They don't really sound much better in Swedish, actually.

A strawberry is a strawberry in Sweden as well.

Yeah, right.

And the Kurdish fox, the name in itself, is not terrifying in any way.

However, during the years, he's amassed quite a reputation, so it might be intimidating in that sense.

Tell me about this reputation and who he is and where he came from.

It's actually sort of a fascinating story.

He was actually born in Iran.

His family is from the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

There was a war between Iran and Iraq and eventually the family found themselves in Sweden.

For all intents and purposes, he seems to have had a normal upbringing, being an everyday kid.

He made his own rap song and he joined a talent show when he was 13, which

his song back then has gotten some new play now.

And it sounds sort of ridiculous as it's meant to be when a year old enters a talent show with a rap song.

Oh let's let's just have a little listen to the song now.

Cool.

Suffice to say he did not win the talent show.

The rap career never really panned out.

However, he seemed from sort of early years to have an interest in entrepreneurship and sales.

Actually, the one subject in school where he received the top grade was in personal sales, which I guess sort of comes in handy when you have an ambition to be a drug kingpin.

Kind of early on, he tried starting a small ice cream shop in the city of Uppsala, where he was living normal ice cream shop most people who live in Uppsala and if they have been out and about on a hot summer's day and they see this ice cream shop odds are they have been buying ice cream from this guy however ice cream wasn't the only thing going on in this in his teens he started committing I would say sort of petty crime with bootleg cigarettes and alcohol

and then on from there going to drugs.

But reaching the late 2010s, the early 2020, he wasn't really a big guy.

He was sort of a mid-level drug dealer in the city of Uppsala, which is Sweden's fourth city.

He didn't really make a splash and he wasn't on the police radar.

I'm sure they were aware of him, but they weren't prioritizing him because they had bigger fish to fry.

Okay.

What happened?

How did he manage to transition from being a small fish to a big fish?

In the spring of 2020, European police actually cracked a encrypted chat tool called EncroChat, which was very popular among European criminals and Swedish criminals especially.

For months, they could monitor what they were writing to each other when they thought that no one was listening and when they thought no one heard.

Police got a lot of evidence and they made a lot of arrests and this vacuum that was left behind sort of was up for the taking for the remainers.

And the Kurdish fox was one of them.

They wanted to arrest him.

They had tons of evidence, but he managed to flee Sweden before any arrest actually happened.

So he was out of the country, but somehow managed to take over the organized crime game in Sweden.

I would say since 2020, the top representatives for the different crime networks haven't been in Sweden.

Police actually have been quite good at arresting these people if they're in Sweden.

Whereas if they are abroad, international bureaucracy has proven to be a very tough opponent to the Swedish police.

So what the Kurdish fox did is he fled to his family's homeland of northern Iraq, to the city of Suleimaniya.

And Swedish police knew where he was.

They knew that he ran this rapidly expanding crime syndicate, but they sort of were haggling with the local authorities.

Either can we arrest him or can you arrest him and send him here?

We just need to stop him somehow.

And eventually, the local authorities agreed, but once they struck against the Kurdish fox, he wasn't at home.

I've been speaking to several Swedish police officers about this, and between the lines, they're saying he might have been tipped off.

Once he left northern Iraq, he went to Turkey and he bought himself a citizenship, which can be done there, citizenship by investment.

So you sort of buy an apartment, so to say, and you receive a citizenship.

Buying citizenships.

Now, where have I heard that referred to in the news recently?

I believe the United States is thinking about doing that.

What an excellent idea.

From what I hear, it's an excellent way of raising capital.

So he's continuing to be able to operate his criminal network in Sweden remotely.

Well, I suppose, you know, 2020-21 was the birth of the work remotely era.

Indeed.

But what happened after that a massive explosion in violence in sort of 2023.

What was the cause of the increase in gun crime in Sweden in that year?

So in Turkey, he sort of expands at a rate that we haven't really seen before.

It's obvious that the Kurdish Fox has his mindset to being the number one drug kingpin in, I wouldn't even say Sweden, I would say the Nordic countries.

And obviously he has good connections in this world, being able to ship large amounts of drugs to Sweden.

However, you also need to control the territory, the sellers, as well as the buyers in some sense.

What he does almost systematically is he goes to the leading person of a certain drug market and he asks, or I'm sure he tells, that you're now selling my stuff.

And I would imagine that they most of the time say, who are you?

I'm not working for you.

Get away.

I'm I'm not interested.

What the Kurdish Fox and his Foxtrot network would then do is go to the second group in line, the youngsters coming up in that same area, and they would offer them weapons and drugs and saying, Basically, if you take this bot over, you're working for us and you're going to make a lot of money.

And as a result of that, you would see lots of clashes between the ones ruling a drug market and the ones Foxtrot sponsored, I would say, or Kurdish Fox sponsored, trying to take it over.

The opinion of the police at this time is that Foxtrot has grown to be the biggest narcotics network in the Nordic countries.

So that's sort of the prelude to why does violence erupt in 2023.

It does so in two stages, actually, because the first one, beginning already in January in 2023, is a normal gang war, so to speak.

The Kurdish Fox and the Foxtrot network have clashed with another, a network that holds some respect and some power.

And for the first time, we are seeing attacks, not against the gang members themselves, because many of them, mind you, are abroad, hiding, not only from police, but also from each other.

But what we see is that they start attacking each other's crime infrastructure in Sweden.

but also each other's families.

And this sort of continues to escalate.

and within the Kurdish Fox crime network in Istanbul and in Turkey people are growing uncomfortable it's sort of in-group politics that start to falter within this group and what happens is that the Kurdish Fox and his Fox Chart networks split into two rivaling factions.

So some of his closest allies overnight turn to be his deadly enemies.

And that includes the strawberry being one of the people that splits off.

The strawberry would be the number one poster boy for this rival faction.

We've already talked about a little bit about the idea that they use what you're now calling child soldiers.

How are they recruiting these children?

And is it a sign of the weakness of the Swedish justice system that this is able to be done?

During 2023, when these gangs were committing acts of violence, basically on the daily, with the shootings, with detonations, they sort of ran out of people to actually commit these because they're not committing these crimes themselves, they're orchestrating them from abroad.

And this, in combination with the new digital era, where you have teenagers constantly on their phone, this became very available for crime networks picking up teenagers who just entered a chat room, for example, thirteen, fourteen, 15-year-old seeing the prospect of earning some money for doing something easy.

These kids, they're different.

Some of them are actually determined to do this.

They sort of know what they're doing, and this is what they want to do.

But you also have a large number of them who are maybe just a bit curious, sort of not serious, just making a first contact.

So, what you see, you would see Instagram stories or signal stories.

Do you want to work right to me?

We've got shootings, we've got detonations, you can make this and that much money.

so they're kind of crime influences definitely definitely right so the the criminals are using memes using whatever stuff that they have available their own social media strategy to draw in followers and then trying to recruit those followers to commit actual crimes definitely when you have these 13 14 15 year old kids boys often actually a few girls as well but boys predominantly who write to these people and maybe they're not really serious.

Maybe they haven't thought this through.

Maybe this is just an exciting way to spend your afternoon.

But what happens quite quickly is that they sort of get trapped.

We've seen several examples of this when one of the first things you have to do is you hop on a video call with one of the recruiters and then you're told to show them your passport.

If you don't have a passport, they say, go and run and get your mom's passport and show that one.

And when you've done that, they have you.

They will sort of threaten you that either you do this, you have agreed to this, you have to follow through, otherwise, we will kill you and your family.

And if you're a 14-15-year-old boy who you know that you've stepped out of line, and the last thing you want to do is have your parents find out what's going on.

You don't want to reveal your mistake.

So, in several of these instances, this has led to kids actually firing a firearm, despite maybe not really wanting to do it.

And another line of pressure that they have is

we've seen in several of these shootings, there are surveillance camera footage.

So you can actually see the shooter walking up to the target and then firing the shots.

But what you see is they have their gun in one hand and they have their phone in the other.

So they're actually on an active video call with the people who have ordered them to do this, which is a way for the recruiters to be there to the very last second where you can disperse all doubt because you say shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, instead of leaving this last moment to this 15-year-old kid to actually not do it.

That's terrifying.

Extraordinary that they could find ways to, you know, get into conversations with these children and then find ways so quickly to blackmail them.

Okay, so what has been happening to these kids who have been getting getting caught in Sweden?

For the coming few years, that's going to be a big issue in Sweden.

Because the way it stands now in Sweden, if you're under the age of 18, you would normally be placed in a sort of youth correctional facility as opposed to prison.

The maximum sentence for that is four years.

So a lot of people are going to come out in the next few years and it hasn't really been been working.

It's sort of been stamped as a university for criminals.

When you get out, you're much worse than you were when you came in.

We're talking about hundreds of kids, hundreds of kids who have, in one way or another, been part of planning a murder, committing a murder, abetting a murder.

For all intents and purposes, have been involved in the plans or actions of murder.

Somehow, Iran is involved in this.

Iran, as far as we know, has arrested the fox.

How did he end up under arrest in Iran?

From the big Foxtrot internal conflict in late 2023,

after

that,

everything is said with a great deal of uncertainty.

Finding out confirmed information has been very, very hard.

But we have sort of a ruling narrative of what happened.

And

when the infighting in Foxtrot broke out, the Kurdish fox, he wasn't the victor in Turkey.

The strawberry Ismail Abdoside was.

So Rawah Majid, the Kurdish fox, he sort of fled Turkey, going east.

And from what we've heard, eventually being arrested at a checkpoint in Iran.

What then happened, again, great deal of uncertainty here.

He was released on the condition that he would do the bidding for Iran's security forces, and he would serve in the sense of using his criminal network to orchestrate acts of violence against Israeli targets in Europe, predominantly in Scandinavia.

And from that point, he's managed to convince these children to go and commit seemingly non-fatal but frightening attacks on Jewish targets and Israeli targets in Scandinavia.

When you think of acts of violence orchestrated by Iran, directed at Israel,

you sort of imagine a high level of violence.

You imagine big explosions.

You imagine people dead.

You imagine terrorism as we think of it.

But these attacks have been a lot less severe in the level of violence.

There have been hand grenades thrown at sort of at the grass next to the embassy, which doesn't really hurt anyone, but it's a clear message that we have the capability of committing violence.

violence it's a threat sort of a message yeah and these attacks have been in nature much more similar to the scare tactics that would exist in the swedish crime world as opposed to international terrorism yes it sounds extraordinarily similar to the situation that we've been seeing in australia in the last year is there pressure on the government to do something about this ongoing criminal problem in Sweden.

I think it's been the main issue for the government for maybe the past five, maybe 10 years.

Wow.

And a lot of things have happened across the whole spectrum from the left to the right.

They have been somewhat agreeing that we need more repression surrounding the criminals.

We need to deal with them more harshly than we have been.

And we've seen a myriad of

laws changed in that direction.

You've got an election in about a year's time from now, is that right?

Should be an interesting year in the lead up to that, I think.

Checking polls doesn't look like the government's doing too well at the moment.

They never do.

It's always better to be in the opposition, I guess, when an election nears.

Kim, this has been a fascinating conversation.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

On Thursday, we're going to have an episode on the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

In the days since the shooting, we've heard lots of different and

conflicting information about the assassins' motivations.

Honestly, every single day, we find out stuff that makes the previous day's assumptions seem totally wrong.

But with US President Donald Trump and his allies calling for revenge on what they call left-wing extremists just minutes after the shooting, does it indicate that a crackdown on anti-Trump movements is inevitable?

That's next on if you're listening.