"The idea is to put more people who travel to commit terrorism on trial in Iraq, and therefore prevent them from returning to Sweden or Europe," Anders Ygeman told Swedish Radio.
According to Ygeman, the Swedish police officers are said to be able to contribute with expertise, training, and also specialist skills like forensic work in order to secure evidence. EU member states are currently in negotiations over a possible operation in Iraq. According to Ygeman, decisive measures would strengthen the Iraqi judiciary.
"The fact is that the Swedish government is embarrassingly bad at putting its own 'terrorist travelers' behind bars, both the ones that are departing and arriving. We have not jailed a single Daesh recruiter, only a single Daesh financier and two terrorists. The difference from neighboring Norway, which in comparison cages in Daesh activists one after another, is just too obvious," Fredrik Haage wrote in his opinion piece.
In March, National Defense College senior researcher Magnus Ranstorp ventured that Sweden lacked any plan of how to deal with returning jihadists, calling the situation "precarious." At the same time, Swedish Democracy and Culture Minister Alice Bah Kuhnke notoriously argued that the returnees must be accepted back into "Sweden's democratic society," unless they can be investigated for crimes carried out abroad (and practice proves they usually can't). At the same time, she was forced to admit that there were no statistics whatsoever on the number of people successfully de-radicalized and landed in hot water for giving a vague "guesstimate," which later proved erroneous.
"No one should have 'retired' Daesh executioners as neighbors. Sweden's lax attitude towards jihadists is nothing but an insult to all the victims of the terrorist sect," Greger Ekman argued in an opinion piece in Swedish newspaper Marienstads-Tidningen.
According to estimates by the Swedish Security Police SÄPO, at least 300 Swedish nationals have traveled abroad to join mid-Eastern terrorist groups since 2012, yielding some of the highest percentage of jihadists per capita of all the European nations. About half of them have returned to Sweden and have been repeatedly identified as the foremost threat to the Swedish security. Notably, a recent national security report by the National Center for Terrorist Threat Assessment (NCT) identified terror attacks inspired by radical Islamist ideology, such as those promoted by Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) or al-Qaeda in the Middle East, as the biggest threat to Sweden.
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