Tulun Tas sits in her flat surrounded by pictures of her beloved son, Emirhan. Tears well up in her eyes as she recalls the night he was killed close to the doorstep of their home near Stockholm, Sweden.

After hearing a noise, she went outside to find him seemingly asleep in his car, with the engine running. In fact, he had been shot dead as he arrived home from the gym.

“I opened the door and saw he was hurt. I [was] just yelling, 'Please send the ambulance.' He was so warm. It was blood, but I didn't know where he was hurt. Still today, I don't know where he was shot."

Emirhan, 18, who later died in hospital, was a victim of gang violence that has gripped Sweden, Ms Tas believes. She is determined to find her son’s killer - and who ordered his assassination.

The National can reveal:

• Teenage hitmen acting on the orders of a gangster nicknamed the Kurdish Fox have terrorised the streets of Stockholm and surrounding towns, shooting and bombing as they gain riches and street cachet selling drugs.
• A former footsoldier in the Foxtrot gang joined the criminal network aged 10, rising through the ranks as he became a big earner, recruiting children to do dirty work as they are below the age of criminal prosecution.
• The Kurdish Fox, the alias of Rawa Majid, is hiding in his home country of Iran. He has also been accused of carrying out attacks on Israel targets for Iran and is under US sanctions.
• An MP says Sweden should call for Iran to deport Majid to face trial, rather than negotiate in the shadows.

Sweden once had one of the lowest crime rates in Europe and a reputation as a safe, liberal country.

That has changed. About 62,000 Swedes are now active in, or have connections to, criminal networks, police figure say. Gun violence now accounts for roughly 49 per cent of all lethal violence in Sweden, whereas in most of Europe, knives remain the most common method. Gun victims were male in 40 of 45 cases in 2024, with the majority happening in one of the major metropolitan police regions of Stockholm, Väst and Syd.

Murders with a gun are at two-and-a-half times the continent’s average - approximately four deaths per million inhabitants each year compared with the average of 1.6 per million - a gruesome statistic in large part driven by the criminal activities of Foxtrot.

In the early 2010s, use of weapons switched from isolated motorcycle gangs who still had their own rules to neighbourhood gangs linked to the drug trade who needed to control their territory.

Violence had no bounds. Anyone could be a target and suddenly well-planned shootings could be a source of income.

Manne Gerell, a criminologist from Malmo University, said: “We've gone from a situation where you had a gang and they would send one of their top guys to shoot someone.

“Now, they will instead hire a project leader who will recruit people running logistics, intelligence and shooters. So. that means that it's become more open to anyone.”

Enter Rawa Majid.

Born in Iran to parents who fled Saddam Hussein’s war on the Kurds in Iraqi-Kurdistan before settling in Sweden, Majid became a player in the crime scene.

He was convicted at age 19 of burglary and cigarette smuggling, before moving on to drug dealing. Despite being sentenced to eight years in jail after drugs were found in his garage by police, he managed to build an extensive criminal network in the city of Uppsala, mostly through the use of violence.

Styling himself as the Kurdish Fox, he sported a giant gold chain with a fox’s head as a pendant. He would also give out rings in the shape of a fox to reward his lieutenants.

The violence escalated when a feud erupted between Majid and Ismail Abdo, a one-time close associate nicknamed Strawberry, who runs the rival Rumba network. It led to a series of tit-for-tat killings, including that of Abdo’s mother.

As well as shooting rivals, they became more creative as they tried to outdo each other. They began stuffing plastic explosives into flasks to create homemade grenades, known as a thermos, which could be thrown at a target.

Majid left the country in 2018 for Turkey, before moving on to Iran. He is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, wanted on murder and attempted murder charges, as well as drugs offences dating to 2020. Swedish authorities have called for him to be extradited, however, politician Alireza Akhondi says they should go further and publicly call for Iran to hand him over rather than negotiate behind closed doors.

Iran-born Mr Akhondi, a member of the Centre Party and prominent critic of the Iranian government, told The National: “I think it's the only way forward. It's important to have a clear voice and the Swedish silent diplomacy, as they call this method, I don't think that works."

He added: “I think the Islamic Republic will say ‘he’s not here, we don’t know where he is’.

"They do everything to put their story as fact but if the Swedish state goes out and says it actually knows he's there, hopefully it will have some consequences.”

Rissa Seidou, a police inspector based in the Rinkeby area north of Stockholm, has seen the impact of gang violence at close quarters.

“I think everything started because he [Majid] wanted to invade an area to make it his base for drug dealing and build up a kind of mafia structure,” she said. “He has cars, watches and the youth think ‘this is the easy money life I want to live’.”

Rinkeby has an almost overwhelmingly migrant population and its children have been recruited by Foxtrot for shootings and bombings.

The National travelled to Sweden and met a former member of the gang, happy to boast about his exploits during his rise through the ranks. He spoke of his pride when the Fox messaged his approval.

In the back of a car, travelling through bare concrete housing blocks, he talked nonchalantly about the buzz he got from shooting his rivals. “It’s fun. It's crazy for the first two hours when you have done it, then you start to run because you don’t want the police to see you,” the 16-year-old said.

At the age of 10, he was spotted by Foxtrot members who befriended him, giving him the responsibility of selling drugs before he graduated to hitman.

“Some of the older guys took care of me because they saw money was a problem [for me],” he said.

“In the beginning, they just gave me money. Then, when I was older, I started to make my own money through their connections. At first, I was selling drugs: cocaine and hash.”

He said his potential was spotted by the Foxtrot “elders”, though who they are “is something I can’t say”.

“They started to give me guns and killing orders,” he said.

His main role was to find other children who would be willing to deal drugs or carry out shootings. Finding such child soldiers is preferable for the gang as under 15s cannot be prosecuted or held criminally responsible under Swedish law. In a response to gang violence, a law change has been proposed reducing the age to 13 for serious crimes. They would often film their work to prove the job had been carried out. Many would take drugs.

“They told me ‘can you blow somebody's house up, or one of your kids?' I even met somebody who wanted to kill somebody. So, I sent that kid to the elders, and they did their thing with him.”

For organising a shooting, he said he received around 40,000 to 50,000 Swedish Krona ($4,300 to $5,375). The child gunmen would be paid anywhere from 200,000 Krona ($21,000) upwards for carrying out the deed.

“I don't care if guys put a price on him and he needs to be killed, you know. That's not my problem.”

The criminals would use the EncroChat application to issue orders. They were so prolific that after the secret app was hacked by law enforcement in 2021, three in every five prosecutions in Sweden used evidence from the network server by 2023. Foxtrot switched to Signal to communicate instead.

Recruits would also be found by the messenger app Telegram, using a VPN to disguise location, with the fox logo a calling card. Instructions are delivered through coded language memes. Some of the tasks are made to look like video games.

The ability to operate across borders was vital for the Kurdish Fox, 39, who left Sweden in 2018 as the feud with Abdo escalated.

He obtained Turkish citizenship through investment in the country. He owns a $2.1 million mansion in the Turkish coastal resort of Marmaris and a luxury flat overlooking Istanbul’s business district.

Having a Turkish passport has allowed him to avoid deportation to Sweden. The two countries have been involved in a stand-off over extraditions, with Sweden rejecting requests to send back Kurdish separatists to face trial in Turkey.

He began using the name Miran Othman as an alias, according to both the US Treasury and Swedish prosecutors.

According to public notices in Turkish newspapers, in 2022 a Miran Othman was involved in a legal dispute with a real estate company over a property in the city of Bodrum. The property was eventually sold to Abdo, suggesting even rivals can work together.

But the law began to catch up with him. In 2023, he was arrested in connection with the discovery of $12,400 and 2,400 Turkish lira found on a park bench in Marmaris.

Swedish prosecutors had hoped Majid would be prosecuted on forgery charges and have his citizenship revoked, but he fled to Iran before he was charged.

His activities spilled out from the criminal underworld into the even murkier world of international conflict.

In May 2024, the Israeli Mossad and the Swedish Sapo intelligence agencies revealed that Iran had been using criminals from both the Foxtrot and Rumba networks to attack Jewish and Israeli targets in Sweden.

Then, in March 2025, the US government linked an attack on the Israeli embassy in Stockholm the previous year to the Foxtrot gang, and Majid in particular, placing both under sanctions.

Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, has set up a task force to deal with Foxtrot, but police in Sweden are usually met with a wall of silence when they speak to anyone affected by the gang.

Tulun Tas, still mourning her son three years after his death, knows this all too well. “Foxtrot has become so big for the Swedish people, they are afraid," she said. "They are afraid of what can happen because it seems that everyone has a connection to Foxtrot. But everyone is not like me, because I don't have fear.”

She has begun her own search for the truth. The police investigation wound down in October 2022, but she has kept seeking answers.

She managed to obtain the mobile number of one of Majid’s henchmen in Baghdad - only for the criminal to be shot dead before she could make contact. He had fallen out with Majid.

She would dearly love a chance to speak with Majid, and would ask if her son had become embroiled in the gang warfare as they lived in an area where several gangs vied for control.

She has braced herself for the fact that delving into what happened to him will likely reveal unpalatable truths about his life.

“I am still looking for answers, and I will accept if I get an answer I don't like. 'He was a killer, he was a drug seller, he was with Foxtrot.' I’m ready to hear that. But so far I haven’t heard anything.

“For me, the important thing is that he was my son, and he was a person. He was a human and no one has the right to take life from you.”