As the sister of a leading Swedish gang member, Faysa Idle had a target on her back. To her, Stockholm felt like a war zone. She couldn’t go anywhere without being followed, she was banned from entering certain neighbourhoods and she was constantly frightened.
“It felt like I didn’t live in Sweden any more. In my head, I felt like I didn’t live in Sweden, I lived in Iraq or something,” says the 25-year-old poet, who has never been in a gang herself but has lost her eldest brother and a close friend to the violence that has engulfed her country.
