Erdogan’s Long Arm Threatens Kurdish Exiles in Sweden

Known for housing one of Sweden’s biggest steel factories and for having hosted a handful of Jimi Hendrix concerts in the late ’60s, Sandviken became a home to Turan in 2015, when he and his wife, Cheikha, decided to flee war to find shelter in Scandinavia.

For the couple, who had met and married in Syria’s north, a region that Kurdish nationalist movements call Rojava—“The West” in the Kurmanji dialect—this quiet Swedish town embodied the opposite of all they had left behind: trauma, persecution, and very little freedom to express their ideas.

In the span of a few years, though, their hopes were smashed to pieces.

Turan’s asylum application was rejected for the first time in 2019. His lawyer appealed the decision, citing both his physical condition—one of his legs had to be amputated after he stepped on a land mine in 1993—and the concrete risks that he could be detained and tortured if sent back to his native Turkey. Despite this, the Swedish Migration Agency, the government body tasked with assessing asylum and residency claims, was unmovable.

At the center of the dispute was Turan’s alleged proximity to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which both Turkey and Sweden consider a terrorist organization. Turan said he sympathized with the movement’s quest for Kurdish rights but never took part in any armed actions. Instead, for years, he kept moving across the borders of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria to escape repression in Turkey, where he was tortured and beaten as a teenager “for singing a Kurdish song,” he said. He finally ended up volunteering as a paramedic along the front line of the battle between the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian-Kurdish militia with ties to the PKK, and armed jihadi factions—a house-to-house confrontation that gained global attention during the Islamic State’s siege of the city of Kobani, repelled by the Kurdish guerrillas at the end of 2014.

“I spent days assisting desperate, screaming people, both civilians and fighters, hit by mortar shells or bomb shrapnels,” he recalled. “I learned how to stitch wounds. I carried injured children on my back.” At the time, many in the Western world saw these Kurdish fighters and volunteers as heroes sacrificing their lives to defeat the Islamic State. Swedish authorities were among the most vocal supporters of the YPG fight against jihadi groups.

A few years later, this enthusiasm and its corollary of political and military support for Kurdish movements gave way to a thinly veiled disavowal as Sweden sought NATO membership, only to be blocked by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who continues to seek concessions from Stockholm—imperiling the lives of political activists and asylum-seekers such as Turan. “We were sung as heroes, and now we risk becoming undocumented,” said Turan, who attempted twice to take his own life out of fear of being deported to Turkey.

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A longtime NATO member, Turkey posed a series of conditions for ratifying the request, which must be approved by all the parties of the military alliance. At the top of those conditions was the extradition of people linked to the PKK or the movement of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, which Turkey’s authorities consider responsible for a coup attempt in 2016.

As Swedish authorities began to comply with these requests, listed in a trilateral memorandum signed in June 2022 with Finland and Turkey, its Kurdish residents seemed to pay the highest price.

An initial request to return 33 terrorists, in Turkey’s wording, quickly escalated to reach about 130 people in January 2023, after left-wing protesters hanged an effigy of Erdogan from a bridge in central Stockholm.

“We could never figure out who was actually at risk of being returned from Sweden, but such declarations instilled fear in many vulnerable people,” said Madelaine Seidlitz, a legal advisor with the Swedish branch of Amnesty International.

The Swedish government—known for its high standards of transparency—hasn’t revealed how many extradition requests it has received or how many deportation orders it has issued since the country submitted its application to NATO. (Press officials at the Justice Ministry did not respond to repeated written requests and phone calls seeking comment.)

The only known extradition to take place—as opposed to a forcible return—occurred in August 2022. Okan Kale, a 35-year-old Turkish citizen who had evaded a prison sentence of 14 years for credit card fraud, was extradited. Turkey’s then-justice minister, Bekir Bozdag, stressed, though, that “extraditing ordinary criminals” didn’t mean that Sweden had “fulfilled its promises.”

A few days after Kale was airlifted from a Swedish to a Turkish prison, police cars surrounded an apartment block on the outskirts of Boras, an industrial city nestled in the pine forests of western Sweden. When officers entered the flat, thanks to a copy of the keys they had previously obtained, Znar Bozkurt and his husband, Tage Carlsson, were asleep with their two cats. Carlsson’s alarm was supposed to ring soon so that he could start his daily shift as a chef in a local school canteen.

In the space of a few hours, then-26-year-old Bozkurt found himself locked in a pre-removal center in Gothenburg, the county capital. Turkish pro-government media were lightning-quick to announce the imminent deportation of a “suspected PKK terrorist.” Only a last-minute appeal against the expulsion order, supported by a wide social mobilization, prevented Bozkurt from becoming the next name on the list.

Bozkurt had moved to Sweden at 17, and once his work visa expired, he applied for asylum. In Sweden, he felt he could express his identity in a rather free way. He could be openly gay, fall in love, and get married and at the same time convert to Christianity and express his progressive, left-leaning political credo, which included a sympathy for the Peoples’ Democratic Party, whose leader Selahattin Demirtas has been imprisoned in Turkey since 2016.

Bozkurt’s application was rejected on the basis of a note by the Sakerhetspolisen (SAPO), the Swedish national security agency. Appeals against the decision were unsuccessful, and in January 2022, he became undocumented.

Prior to issuing its opinion, SAPO had summoned Bozkurt for an interview. There, he was told by agents that they had seen Instagram pictures of him at a recent demonstration, where PKK flags were being waved behind him.

Bozkurt’s deportation order was suspended on the basis of a fear of ill treatment if he were to be sent back to Turkey. He then obtained a one-year temporary residency permit. SAPO’s assessment, however, seems to be impossible to review. “Both his designation as a risk for national security and his deportation order haven’t been canceled yet,” his lawyer Miran Kakaee said.

Data provided by the Swedish Migration Agency shows a significant increase in the number of asylum requests by Turkish citizens since 2016, when a failed coup opened the way for mass arrests and a clampdown on civil society and the media. In 2015, 290 new asylum applications from Turkish citizens were registered, rising to 889 in 2017.

The Swedish Migration Agency and SAPO increased collaboration throughout 2022, leading to an increase in the number of personal reports by the security service, which automatically block any asylum claim or application for permanent stay.

In 2021, Human Rights Watch reported that more than 130,000 people were under investigation in Turkey because of alleged links to the Gulen movement, while about 8,500 people were detained for alleged links to the PKK. The rights group highlighted that terrorism charges were routinely used to restrict civil rights and attack those opposing the ruling Justice and Development Party.

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In 1984, after a PKK defector was assassinated in the country, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme decided to outlaw the group, the first government in Europe to do so. (A second defector was killed in 1985.) The United States would designate the PKK as a foreign terrorist organization only in 1997 and the European Union in 2002.

In 1986, after Palme was killed in Stockholm, in what remains one of the most intricate and still unsolved episodes of violence in Europe’s Cold War era, a possible implication of PKK members was mentioned by a police commissioner in charge of the case. No evidence ever emerged, but the news created a climate of suspicion toward Kurds. Nonetheless, more Kurds started to reach Sweden in the 1990s, in relation to conflict and persecutions in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.

Swedish authorities “have never been particularly strict in enforcing the 1984 ban on the PKK, showing instead sympathy toward the Kurdish cause,” according to Paul Levin, who heads Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. For this reason, Sweden’s NATO application and its acceptance of Turkey’s conditions “have been a paradigm shift for Sweden, particularly for groups and people [who] might be seen as linked with the PKK.”

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As soon as he landed in Istanbul, Tat was brought to court, where he had already been convicted in absentia, and then sent directly to prison. Bozdag, the justice minister, declared in an interview that the operation showed Sweden’s “sincerity and goodwill” and that he hoped these “extraditions” would continue.

While Turkish authorities removed their veto on Finland’s NATO application, opening the way to the country’s official accession in April, Swedish authorities hope that Ankara’s resistance will be eased now that Turkey’s closely contested election is over. Press officials for Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom told Foreign Policy that “Sweden has delivered on each paragraph of the trilateral memorandum and will continue to implement it in line with Swedish and international law.”

The pivotal moment will be NATO’s annual summit, to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week. With the summit’s deadline looming and Erdogan confirmed for another five years at the head of the Turkish government, Western diplomats and politicians are doing their best to accelerate Sweden’s accession.

“I congratulated Erdogan. He still wants to work on something on the F-16s. I told him we wanted a deal with Sweden, so let’s get that done,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters in a press conference at the White House on May 29, mentioning the secretive negotiation over Turkey’s access to the U.S.-led jet fighter program.

One day later, Sweden’s Supreme Court greenlit the extradition of a Turkish Kurdish citizen, Mehmet Kokolu, sentenced in Turkey in 2014 for transporting cannabis. The government will have the final word on Kokolu’s extradition.

Research for this article was supported by the Evens Foundation.