Rawa Majid and Ismael Abdo: Swedish Gangsters Revealed as Iranian Proxies

Rawa Majid and Ismael Abdo: Swedish Gangsters Revealed as Iranian Proxies

Executive Summary:

• In late May, Mossad attributed two attacks against the Israeli embassy in Stockholm to Iranian-backed criminal networks active in the country. The individuals at the core of these networks are Rawa “The Kurdish Fox” Majid and Ismael “The Strawberry” Abdo.
• The decision by Swedish intelligence to confirm these allegations represents a clear shift in the country’s approach toward Iran, denying Tehran the plausible deniability it has relied on in past incidents.
• Majid and Abdo both fled Sweden for Turkey, where they each managed to acquire citizenship. Majid then ran to Iran, where he appears to have been offered the choice to collaborate with the regime or go to jail. Abdo is out on bail in Turkey, and his reasons for working with Iran are not known.

In late May, the Israeli national intelligence service Mossad publicly attributed two attacks against the country’s embassy in Stockholm to Iran and its two Sweden-based criminal network proxies. These Israeli intelligence investigations were opened after two separate incidents: a hand grenade was discovered inside the embassy’s grounds on January 31, and on May 17, shots were fired near the same location (Times of Israel, May 30). These events have provided a rare glimpse into the murky convergence of organized crime and state sponsorship of terror in Sweden.

Rise of Majid and Abdo’s Criminal Networks

At the center of Israeli allegations are two individuals: Rawa Majid, who is known as “The Kurdish Fox,” and Ismael Abdo, nicknamed “The Strawberry.” [1] Majid was born in Kermanshah, Iran in 1986, but when he was one month old his Iraqi Kurdish family moved to Upsala, Sweden, where he grew up. In his teens, Majid began a career in crime by selling stolen goods. Later, he moved into drug trafficking. After eight years in prison for drug-related offenses, he received a threat to his life from a rival crime group, causing Majid to flee from Sweden in 2018 to Türkiye. Majid managed to become a Turkish citizen through the country’s “golden visa program”—the investment in this case being the purchase of a $300,000 villa—despite there being an existing Interpol warrant out for his arrest (Cumhuriyet Daily, March 4). Subsequently, Majid moved to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he changed his name to Miran Othman and built up an organized crime group called Foxtrot.

Foxtrot is suspected of high-volume drug trafficking in and to Sweden. Foxtrot’s point man in Sweden, Ismael Abdo, was sentenced in 2016 to a five-year prison term for weapons- and drug-related crimes. Shortly after his release, Abdo was again accused of drug trafficking, but he managed to avoid further jail time by escaping to Türkiye in 2022 (Dagens Nyheter, May 30).

In 2023, a confrontation between Foxtrot and a Stockholm-based gang known as Dalennätverket (“The Dalen Network”) led to spiraling violence. [2] This was followed by an internal dispute within Foxtrot on how to take over the drug market in Sweden. A dispute then emerged, which led to a split between Majid and the 34-year-old Abdo, who established his separate group, Rumba (Sveriges Television News, September 19, 2023).

With their leaders in exile, rival gang members started to kill each other in a brutal turf war that spread across Sweden and into Türkiye. A turning point was reached when Majid oversaw Abdo’s mother’s killing in Upsala in September 2023. This was followed by an attempt to kill Majid’s own mother-in-law, who survived. Two teenage boys were detained for the killing of Abdo’s mother, which is consistent with both groups’ use of teenagers in attacks. According to Swedish police, by spring 2024, the balance of power had shifted in Abdo’s favor (Dagens Nyheter, March 14).

The Iranian Connection

Majid escaped to Iran in September 2023 after Swedish authorities requested that Turkish officials extradite him to Sweden. The choice was well timed, as Swedish–Iranian relations had recently hit rock bottom. Iran, for example, detained several Swedish nationals, including Swedish EU diplomat Johan Floderus in April 2022 for espionage charges. Floderus was released on June 16 in exchange for the Iranian Hamid Noury, who was serving a life sentence in Sweden for his role in killing political prisoners (EU Diplomatic Service, December 12, 2023; Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, January 17; Swedish Prime Minister’s Office, June 17).

In Iran, Majid was arrested in October 2023, where authorities allegedly gave him a choice between prison time or cooperation with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, or Vezarat-e Ettela’at Jomhuri-ye Eslami-ye Iran (VAJA, previously MOIS) (Dagens Nyheter, May 30, 2024). From Iran, Majid has continued to direct his criminal network in Sweden, including diverging at least some of its capabilities to conduct terrorist attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets on behalf of Iran. The January 2024 hand grenade attack was conducted, according to authorities, by Foxtrot (Times of Israel, May 30).

Less is known about the link between Abdo and Iran, including how, when, and why the relationship was forged in the first place. Nevertheless, the investigation into the shooting incident close to the Israeli embassy in May led the authorities to believe that the shooting was carried out by Abdo’s network, Rumba (Times of Israel, May 30). Abdo, who also has obtained Turkish citizenship, was arrested at the end of May in Adana but was since set free on bail for 20,000 lira (roughly $600) (Haberler.com, May 27).

Conclusion

The Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) confirmed Israeli claims that Iran is using Swedish organized crime networks as proxies. The SÄPO counterintelligence head, Daniel Stenling, stated that the organization was able to prevent several cases in recent years where there was concrete evidence that assassination plots linked with Iranian security services utilized criminal networks in Sweden as proxies (Sveriges Television News, June 1). The linking of Majid and Abdo to attacks on Israeli targets marks the first time, however, that the names of criminals and organizations recruited by Iran have been revealed.

For Iran, using Swedish criminal proxies has provided some measure of plausible deniability. The public manner in which Israel and Sweden have now exposed Iran through Majid and Abdo is likely an attempt to rob Iran of this deniability. This might also render the two organized crime groups useless to Tehran, which would leave Majid stranded in Iran and Abdo in Türkiye.

Notes:

[1] Abdo’s colorful nickname stems from his participation in the illicit market of roadside strawberry stands in Sweden, through which he laundered more than $12 million a year. Sweden’s produce market has become a surprisingly lucrative vector for money laundering. Authorities now warn that these illegal vendors have become fronts for funding brutal gang wars that have taken Sweden from having one of the lowest rates of gun-related fatalities globally to one of the highest in Europe in merely a decade (The Week [United Kingdom], June 26; Newsendip, July 27).

[2] The “Dalen Network” refers to a local criminal network involved in drug trafficking active around Stockholm.