When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally signed off on Sweden’s accession to Nato late last month, there were sighs of relief from Stockholm to Washington DC. The Turkish president’s decision to approve the military alliance’s latest member – 20 months after it had asked to join – marked the closure of a fraught diplomatic chapter and now leaves Hungary’s Viktor Orbán the only figure standing between Sweden and Nato.
But, while political leaders are toasting the breakthrough, the mood in one Swedish community is far from celebratory. Members of the sizeable Kurdish population say that Stockholm’s diplomatic success has come at their expense and that they feel systematically targeted by the Swedish state.
