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Vanished Swedish teen calls mum from Syria

UPDATED: A 15-year-old girl from southern Sweden who has been missing since last month, has phoned her family to say she’s in Homs in Syria, Swedish media are reporting.

Published: 30 June 2015 09:30 CEST
Updated: 30 June 2015 13:30 CEST
Vanished Swedish teen calls mum from Syria
A photo from Nusra Front's Twitter feed in March 2015. Photo: TT

The teenager, who has been put on an international watchlist, is said to have called home a few days ago, telling her mother that she had made it to Syria after travelling through Turkey with her boyfriend.

According to Sweden’s Aftonbladet newspaper, which has spoken to the girl’s mother, the line was crackly, but the teenager suggested that she was planning to join al-Nusra, an extremist Islamist group with links to al-Qaeda.

The girl told her family that she was currently in Homs but that the couple were planning to travel to another city shortly, adding that she would live with a group of women while her partner began military training.

READ ALSO: Why teenage girls are leaving home to join Isis

“I am waiting to hear back from them,” the teenager’s mother is quoted as saying by Aftonbladet.

“I cannot describe how terrible this is and I just wish I could go there myself and fetch her.”

The schoolgirl, who has not been named by Swedish media, has been missing from her home in southern Sweden since May 31st.

Her disappearance is being investigated by regional police in Halland in southern Sweden, the operational department of Sweden's national force (NOA, Nationella operativa avdelningen) told The Local on Monday.

“The girl is internationally wanted as missing by Interpol,” added press spokeswoman Carolina Ekéus.

She was however unable to confirm reports that the girl had made it to Syria.

News of the missing girl’s apparent journey comes as concerns grow about the number of young girls leaving one of the safest countries in the world to join radical groups in the Middle East, with reports that at least 30 have travelled from Sweden to Iraq or Syria over the past year.

Last month Magnus Ranstorp from the Swedish Defence University told The Local that some girls “look up to the fighters like pop stars.” 

“For a lot of the girls this is a form of emancipation in a perverse way. They think they are getting away from the leash of patriarchal structures in their families or the areas where they live,” he said.

Last week, Sweden's government announced it was considering drafting new legislation that would ban its nationals from fighting in armed conflicts for terrorist organisations such as Isis (also known as IS or the Islamic State).

“It is completely unacceptable that Swedish citizens are travelling to [join] IS, financing the organization, or fighting for it,” Justice Minister Morgan Johansson and Home Affairs Minister Anders Ygeman wrote in a joint article in Sweden's Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

“We have a responsibility for what our citizens do both here, at home and in other countries,” they said.

For members

POLITICS

‘Very little debate’ on consequences of Sweden’s crime and migration clampdown

Sweden’s political leaders are putting the population’s well-being at risk by moving the country in a more authoritarian direction, according to a recent report.

Published: 29 April 2024 08:56 CEST
'Very little debate' on consequences of Sweden's crime and migration clampdown

The Liberties Rule of Law report shows Sweden backsliding across more areas than any other of the 19 European Union member states monitored, fuelling concerns that the country risks breaching its international human rights obligations, the report says.

“We’ve seen this regression in other countries for a number of years, such as Poland and Hungary, but now we see it also in countries like Sweden,” says John Stauffer, legal director of the human rights organisation Civil Rights Defenders, which co-authored the Swedish section of the report.

The report, compiled by independent civil liberties groups, examines six common challenges facing European Union member states.

Sweden is shown to be regressing in five of these areas: the justice system, media environment, checks and balances, enabling framework for civil society and systemic human rights issues.

The only area where Sweden has not regressed since 2022 is in its anti-corruption framework, where there has been no movement in either a positive or negative direction.

Source: Liberties Rule of Law report

As politicians scramble to combat an escalation in gang crime, laws are being rushed through with too little consideration for basic rights, according to Civil Rights Defenders.

Stauffer cites Sweden’s new stop-and-search zones as a case in point. From April 25th, police in Sweden can temporarily declare any area a “security zone” if there is deemed to be a risk of shootings or explosive attacks stemming from gang conflicts.

Once an area has received this designation, police will be able to search people and cars in the area without any concrete suspicion.

“This is definitely a piece of legislation where we see that it’s problematic from a human rights perspective,” says Stauffer, adding that it “will result in ethnic profiling and discrimination”.

Civil Rights Defenders sought to prevent the new law and will try to challenge it in the courts once it comes into force, Stauffer tells The Local in an interview for the Sweden in Focus Extra podcast. 

He also notes that victims of racial discrimination at the hands of the Swedish authorities had very little chance of getting a fair hearing as actions by the police or judiciary are “not even covered by the Discrimination Act”.

READ ALSO: ‘Civil rights groups in Sweden can fight this government’s repressive proposals’

Stauffer also expresses concerns that an ongoing migration clampdown risks splitting Sweden into a sort of A and B team, where “the government limits access to rights based on your legal basis for being in the country”.

The report says the government’s migration policies take a “divisive ‘us vs them’ approach, which threatens to increase rather than reduce existing social inequalities and exclude certain groups from becoming part of society”.

Proposals such as the introduction of a requirement for civil servants to report undocumented migrants to the authorities would increase societal mistrust and ultimately weaken the rule of law in Sweden, the report says.

The lack of opposition to the kind of surveillance measures that might previously have sparked an outcry is a major concern, says Stauffer.

Politicians’ consistent depiction of Sweden as a country in crisis “affects the public and creates support for these harsh measures”, says Stauffer. “And there is very little talk and debate about the negative consequences.”

Hear John Stauffer from Civil Rights Defender discuss the Liberties Rule of Law report in the The Local’s Sweden in Focus Extra podcast for Membership+ subscribers.

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