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.
In the end, the mental toll of years living at the centre of Sweden’s gang wars and her fear and hopelessness amid the escalating situation, both in her community in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta and at home with her family, was too much. She was unable to work any more and her life started to rapidly unravel. She started smoking cannabis, stopped caring for herself, became violent and lost her sense of boundaries.
“Everything in life became meaningless,” she says. “It was like I hated life so much that I could stand in the middle of the square and say: ‘Kill me, please. I beg you, kill me. Because I can’t carry on, I can’t go on one day more.’”
But in 2020, she found the strength to walk away. The turning point came when Idle and her siblings, each with a price of 100,000 krona (£7,500) on their heads, narrowly escaped with their lives from the wedding of one of her brothers, Bilal, who was wanted by a rival group. Panic had broken out on the dancefloor after word spread that police had stopped three heavily armed teenage boys 20 minutes from the wedding venue. Since then, Bilal has been arrested in Spain, where he remains in custody on suspicion of serious crimes.
Now, while the country comes to terms with the deadliest month of shootings since records began in 2016, Idle has chosen to speak out about the violence and how it is destroying families, particularly the lives of women, and communities. Idle’s newly released book, Ett ord för blod (A word for blood), has made waves in Sweden, documenting the brutal impact of the violence on innocent sisters, partners and mothers.
A total of 11 people died in Sweden in September in shootings, resulting in urgent soul-searching by members of the public, police chiefs and politicians. The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said in a national address last week: “Sweden has never seen anything like it. No country in Europe has seen anything like it.” Blaming “political naivety” and “unsuccessful integration”, Kristersson, whose minority-run government came into power a year ago pledging to tackle gang crime, said he would “chase” and “defeat” the gangs.
But the problem appears to be escalating. By 15 September, a total of 34 people had died this year in shootings, according to police figures. In 2022, there were 391 shootings in Sweden, 62 of which were fatal, while 45 people were killed by gunfire the previous year.
“It breaks your heart that it is getting worse but I feel that my book is most current now and I am going to try to do what I can do from my direction and [affect] as many people as I can,” says Idle.
There are two Swedens, she says, that exist in parallel: the one that she grew up in, in Tensta, where her Somalian mother had multiple jobs to try to make ends meet, and “the other Sweden”, where people don’t have to live with the same stress and danger or worry about income from a young age.
The problem is systemic, she says, between Swedish authorities and refugee and immigrant communities living in poverty. “It’s clear, they have actively not wanted to let us in.”
To solve the current crisis, the country needs to come together, she adds. “We need to meet, all of us actually, Sweden needs to meet and make some sort of difference. We will never be able to do it if we sit and blame one another.” The steadily decreasing age of the children and young people dying is devastating, she says. “It’s scary. It makes me so afraid that it is 15-year-olds. It’s horrible.”
Before 2015, when violence erupted in her neighbourhood and she says everyone was forced to pick a side, Tensta was a happy, bustling community. But that year, her friend was shot dead. Soon it became normal to see her brother Bilal, who was a leading member of the gang Shottaz, in a bulletproof vest. While he was in prison, her eldest brother, a father-of-four and taxi driver, was killed aged 34 in 2018.
“I wrote this book because we girls have been very oppressed for a long time. We haven’t had a voice, we haven’t been able to protect ourselves, we have been hung out on social media, private pictures are out there online,” she says.
“Those guys are angry at each other, meaning that we who are sisters to some of these guys end up in the clutches of it all and then it means that we become victims of something we haven’t created.”
Through their actions, women are forced to live in stress and fear while trying to do normal jobs and live their lives. “It stops you from coming into society properly, because you have other rules and other conditions.”
Tears flowing, she describes the pain of burying her brother, who was murdered near their family home in 2018. The next day she was at work at 9am to open up the shop.
When she sought psychiatric help, the doctor at first thought she needed to be hospitalised because they thought she was having psychosis. “They didn’t believe my life,” she says, after telling them the multiple traumatic experiences she had undergone.
To be a woman in the environment she grew up in is painful. “You’re worried for your brother, you’re worried for your son, you’re worried if he’s going to come home tonight,” she adds. “We women have lived too long in silence.”
The actions of their family members also impact how they are viewed by society, she says. “Even though you try to do well, try to do good, every day when you poke, poke, poke, poke,” she says, indicating the pressure on her temples, “push, push, push, in the end we think: fuck it. They are always going to see me like this [affiliated with gangs] and it’s always going to be like this.”
Idle, who has always been a voracious reader and writer, says her words have saved her. “My words are the only powerful weapon I have and innermost inside me I knew it [the book] was going to make a difference, otherwise I wouldn’t have written it.”
Idle’s words and pictures have been featured across national newspapers and radio after the publication of her book, and since the latest wave of violence, her voice has been prominent in the national conversation. Soon after three people were killed in just 12 hours last week, she spoke at the Gothenburg book fair of her anger, saying: “We must protect the women at all costs.”
But it hasn’t come without risk and danger. To publish this book, breaking the code of silence by speaking so openly, particularly as a woman, she has had to break away from everything she knows and start an entirely new life. She has moved to a new area and has limited contact with old acquaintances.
“I don’t know what the consequences are of this but I know that we have already lived the consequences for a long time. We have already lived in misery,” she says, adding: “I am very, very courageous. And I am a woman who is tired.”
