Tehran is turning violent networks like Sweden’s Foxtrot and Ireland’s Kinahan cartel into tools of covert statecraft
On Oct. 1, 2024, gunfire cracked near the Israeli Embassy in Sweden’s capital, Stockholm. Later that day, two hand grenades exploded near the Israeli Embassy in Copenhagen, the Danish capital. The attacks were carried out by young men, reportedly aged between 15 and 20, with ties to Swedish organized crime.
Swedish and Israeli investigators blamed Foxtrot, a cold and violent Swedish transnational crime syndicate that has dominated the northern European underworld. But why would a gang whose main business is to supply northern Europe with narcotics end up targeting Israeli embassies? Had its elusive mob boss, Rawa Majid, suddenly embraced the Palestinian cause?
Curiously, on March 12, 2025, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also took an interest in Majid and his gang, announcing sanctions on both. Was this simply Trumpian overreach, or was there something deeper at play? Rubio suggested that the answer lay in the shadowy corridors of Tehran and Iran’s foreign policy. Majid was a valuable piece on the Iranian chessboard.
At first glance, Majid might appear to be the victim of hyperbole. President Donald Trump has used Sweden as an example of liberal immigration policies destroying countries through crime and social decay. Majid is the son of Kurdish-Iranian refugees. His parents had fled the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and settled in the leafy university town of Uppsala, where their son, instead of studying, excelled in crime. Majid built his group relying on close ties to family, friends and clan. He also displayed a ruthlessness that knew no limits. When his friend Ismail Abdo set up Rumba, a splinter group that mirrored Foxtrot’s activities, the friendship turned into enmity. Majid is suspected of ordering the killing of Abdo’s mother in 2023.
Known as the “Kurdish Fox,” Majid’s exploits became notorious. His organization regularly graced the Swedish tabloids, who accused him of flooding northern Europe with narcotics. He sourced drugs from South America, hiding them in containers stuffed with bananas and agricultural goods. He smuggled drugs and arms across the Oresund Bridge that connects Denmark to Sweden — and that connected him to continental drug cartels across Europe.
Majid was also adept at using children to carry out assassinations. He understood that Sweden’s liberal justice system prioritized rehabilitation over punishment, especially for minors. Exploiting this loophole, he turned teenagers into child soldiers. From this pool of recruits came the young men who allegedly carried out the attacks on the Israeli embassies.
According to Swedish and Israeli security services, Majid’s exploits made him the perfect candidate to carry out Iran’s dirty work abroad. His expertise and criminal connections spanned Europe and the Middle East. He was a chameleon. He had no loyalty to any flag, ideology or country. If he worshipped anything, it was money. And that was perfect for the Iranians.
In today’s world, fortune favors the weak. War has become increasingly unconventional, and weaker states can access lethal, cheaper technologies capable of hurting stronger, better-equipped states without the need to confront them directly. After all, direct confrontation can be costly. A $150 drone can take out a $2 million Howitzer. A North Korean hacker can shut down Britain’s National Health Service or drain Bangladesh’s national bank. Modified pagers can take out entire paramilitary organizations. For a state like Iran, using Majid was a low-cost, effective way to achieve its goals that could always be denied if accusations were leveled.
To understand why Iran might use a Swedish gangster as a foreign policy asset, it is important to revisit Tehran’s history of covert operations abroad and examine how Iranian strategy has changed over the years. What becomes clear is that Majid is just one element in Iran’s broader playbook for achieving its political aims on the global stage.
The Islamic Revolution had barely cooled in 1979 before Iran began to carry out audacious and brazen plots to eliminate its enemies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America. A few months after the revolution, in December 1979, Shahriar Shafiq — a nephew of the deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — was assassinated in Paris. This was not unusual for the time. Israel also carried out similar operations and eliminated its enemies abroad. But Iran was friendless and didn’t have powerful allies like the United States. Iran’s actions isolated it and justified its international pariah status in the eyes of the world. The fledgling republic came to realize that using its own agents to eliminate targets across the globe was counterproductive. It was too risky and too visible.
Meanwhile, with crippling international sanctions and without access to global financial markets, Iran needed to evade punitive measures in order to generate revenue to keep its military machine running. It had to procure vital military equipment to supply its armed forces and its proxies. It also needed to eliminate key opponents abroad, such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), and the domestic Green Movement. It achieved this by adopting the statecraft equivalent of Bruce Lee’s maxim: “Be like water.”
In this spirit, Iran changed tactics and became more pragmatic. It became less reliant on ideological allies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah and successfully turned transnational crime cartels into a tool of foreign policy. It relied on both Iranian and foreign criminal organizations to carry out its wishes with a cover of plausible deniability.
Iran depends on homegrown kingpins such as Naji Sharifi Zindashti to attack its enemies abroad. Zindashti’s criminal connections stretch from Tehran to Istanbul, London and Toronto. The crime boss hired Canadian Hells Angels members in a plot to kill Iranian dissidents. Turkish authorities say Zindashti was involved in the abduction of a Swedish-Iranian activist in 2020, who was later executed in Iran. Majid’s Foxtrot, then, appears to be just one criminal organization out of many across the world that Iran employs to carry out its covert operations.
Foxtrot might even be considered small fry in comparison to the Irish Kinahan cartel, which has far older ties with Iran. The Kinahan cartel may have started from humble beginnings in Dublin, but by the time it began dealing with the Iranians, its criminal interest and reach spanned the world. The cartel’s ties to Tehran reveal how sophisticated the policy had become. Iran’s relationship with the Irish crime family dates back to at least 2016. Led by Irish crime dons Christopher “Christy” Kinahan Sr. and his sons Daniel and Christy Jr., the cartel is worth around $1 billion, mostly because of its narcotics operations. Despite being implicated in a number of murders, its flamboyant de facto leader Daniel was even name-checked by former world boxing champion Tyson Fury.
For Iran, the Kinahans brought their criminal connections and expertise in cleaning illicit income in jurisdictions where there was little financial oversight, such as Cyprus, Malta and Dubai. In 2016, Irish police discovered that the group had contracted a Dutch-Moroccan criminal to assassinate an Iranian opponent of the regime. Later, after the Kinahans moved to Dubai, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that they were laundering money on the resort island of Kish, a free-trade zone in Iran known for its hard and fast ways with money. Reports also emerged that the cartel was doing business with Hezbollah, allegedly funneling money through Syria and Lebanon. Christy Kinahan was even trying to purchase airplane parts on behalf of Tehran. Iranian airline companies were always in search of aviation parts for their aging fleets.
The Kinahan-Iran relationship alerted European security services to how Iran had incorporated transnational crime syndicates into its statecraft. This realization marked a shift: Organized crime was no longer just a law enforcement issue — it was now a national security threat. In 2022, Joe Biden’s administration offered a $5 million reward for the arrest of any of its members.
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have now identified the Iranian connection to the Japanese Yakuza, the “Mocro Mafia” in the Netherlands, Peruvian drug traffickers and Eastern European mafia groups. This connection was further evidence that Iranian statecraft had adapted to modern geopolitical realities.
Against this backdrop, Rubio’s sanctioning of Majid doesn’t seem like political theater, but rather a recognition of how the geopolitical playing field has changed. It was an acknowledgment that a tactic that had once been confined to the shadowy periphery of Machiavellian statecraft could become standard practice in an age of strongmen. It is likely that we will see more of these measures coming from the State Department, sanctioning actors who blend criminality and foreign policy.
This evolution in tactics presents major challenges for Western security services. The stakes are immensely high, with implications for global order, law enforcement, the judiciary, business and civil society. Blurring the line between crime and statecraft will have major consequences. Such actions will no doubt affect Middle Eastern diasporas, who may face growing suspicion — simply because of their faith or politics.
Meanwhile, criminals like Majid and the Kinahans may be the ones who escape justice — skilled in operating within gray zones, they may find safe havens in Tehran, Moscow or other states that have use for them.
After buying a golden visa to Turkey, Majid is now said to be a fugitive on the run. Some have placed him in Iran, others in Afghanistan. As for the Kinahan cartel, they have not been seen in Dubai since sanctions were imposed on them, and word is that they are living it up in Iran — still in business, it seems. The question now is not whether Iran will continue weaponizing organized crime — but whether the West has the resolve and strategy to grapple with the problem.
Last weekend, in Oman, U.S. and Iranian officials sat down for indirect talks over Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. is demanding it be fully dismantled, while Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi insists that direct negotiations will only proceed if Trump takes the military option off the table. But even if Araghchi succeeds in removing war from the equation, Iran would still be free to wage its shadow war — launching its army of transnational crime syndicates against its adversaries. The question is whether the U.S. can contain both Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its weaponization of organized crime — without setting the region ablaze. If the nuclear talks make progress, perhaps Washington will also confront the criminal threat.
