Last August, Sweden raised alarm by announcing that the country and its citizens had become targets of Islamist terrorist organizations after a number of anti-immigration activists set fire to the Quran. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for severe punishment for those responsible and said Sweden was in confrontational mode with the Muslim world. “We know that Hezbollah, Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda have called on their supporters to carry out actions against Sweden,” intelligence chief Charlotte von Essen said. she said. Two months later, unfortunately, the warning turned out to be true: The man who shot a group of Swedish fans with Kalashnikovs in Brussels yesterday, killing two of them, announced in a series of videos that he wanted to target the citizens of the Scandinavian country.
Brussels attack
According to the news of Belgian prosecutor Frédéric Van Leeuw, the man who said his name is Abdesalem Al Guilani is said to have said in this video, “The Book of Allah is a red line for which man sacrifices himself.” A possible reference to the burning of Qur’anic texts in Sweden. The Scandinavian country is not the only country where such demonstrations have taken place in recent months (similar protests also took place in Denmark), but increasing hate campaigns in Iran, as in Iraq, are being carried out in Stockholm. It concentrated all the way to Turkey.
Experts suspect there is more behind the fires than a simple anti-immigration protest. The case of Salwan Momika is illuminating in this sense: The man is an Iraqi refugee of the Christian religion who says he wants to condemn the atrocities committed in his country by burning the pages of the holy book of Islam. religion. He did this in front of the main mosque in Stockholm at the end of June. Following his gesture, hundreds of people attacked the Swedish embassy in Baghdad upon the call of the Iraqi Shiite leader. There were also protests in other countries, from the Middle East to Asia, passing through the Maghreb. Turkish leader Recep Erdogan used the incident to raise the stakes in the difficult negotiations for Sweden’s NATO membership, which Ankara had been waiting for the green light.
According to Foreign Policy columnist Elisabeth Braw, Erdogan is not the only leader of the Islamic world trying to gain political advantage from the burning of the Quran in Europe. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is speaking out against the fires in Sweden to “divert attention” from ongoing protests in support of women’s rights in his country. “The Swedish government must know that supporting criminals against the Islamic world is tantamount to taking sides in the war,” Khamenei said a few days ago. Even in Iraq, where Momika, the author of the Stockholm fire that sparked the protests, comes from, the government is using these events to regain the consensus it has lost due to galloping inflation.
Who is Momika?
The factors that worry Momika, who restarted her protests by burning a copy of Horn in front of the Swedish Parliament at these hours, do not seem to worry her much. So who is Momika? Until June, little was known about him: he had arrived in Sweden in 2018 and applied for asylum. But an investigation by France24 revealed that Momika was no ordinary refugee: She belonged to the Christian militia in Iraq within the Imam Ali Brigades, a militant organization linked to Iran. In a video discovered by France24, Momika identifies herself as the leader of this militia. According to a French television investigation, the man left Iraq not because he was being persecuted by religious fundamentalists but because of a power struggle with another Christian militia. “Whatever Momika’s motivations, her provocations in Sweden give regimes in Iran and Iraq a unique opportunity to deflect citizens’ frustrations on themselves,” Braw writes.
Russian disinformation
Finally, there is Russia. The fires complicate Stockholm’s path to NATO, which, as we have said, is seen as a form of protection against possible retaliation from Russia in the context of the war in Ukraine. Swedish leaders reiterated their opposition to insults against Islam and other religions. And that the demonstrations of those who burned the Quran were allowed not because of their content, but because the laws on freedom of expression enshrined in the Constitution provide for this. However, articles often circulate on the Internet with headlines that Sweden wants to encourage fires.
Swedish intelligence has documented nearly 1 million published articles about Sweden and the Quran burnings; This is an extraordinary number. “These actions are often reported completely falsely, with the aim of harming Sweden and Swedish interests, and sometimes by direct invitation,” Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said at a press conference on July 26. Speaking at the press conference, Bohlin said, “Russian-backed actors are actively strengthening erroneous claims that the Swedish state is behind the desecration of holy books,” adding that the accusations “are made with the aim of causing division and weakening the position of international competition.” Sweden”.
Just last Thursday, a Swedish court found a 27-year-old man guilty of inciting hatred after burning a Quran in front of a church. The punishment is not related to the fire, but to insults towards Muslims. This sentence seemed likely to add fuel to the flames of tension around Stockholm. But unfortunately the attack in Brussels proved the opposite.
Source: Today IT
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
