Sweden’s latest attempts to integrate its migrant population have suffered one or two hiccups after it was learned that staff at its ‘assimilation guide service’ were recruiting people into the Islamic State. A partial success, then.
According to a recent BBC report, the Scandinavian country now tops the European jihadi league, although others give Belgium that honour.
Presumably all those Swedes joining the Islamic State have been radicalised by their country’s relentless military aggression; after all we’re always being told British foreign policy is to blame for our extremism problem.
The number of Isis fighters from around the world illustrates that the Iraq-Syria conflict is the first war in the age of free movement, with Islamists attracting recruits from the alienated of the world. It is a war that mixes the ultra-modern, medieval and ancient, with social media being used to spread beheading pictures and gruesome executions in Raqqa that resemble those in ancient Rome.
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