From militia leader to refugee: The backstory of the man who burned a Koran in Sweden

A Christian man who immigrated from Iraq to Sweden stomped on a Koran then burnt it on June 28, 2023, in front of Stockholm’s largest mosque on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid. 

Momika had a friend film the whole scene. He also put slices of ham on the Koran – an act that the Swedish minister for foreign affairs has said amounts to “Islamophobia“. Momika actually applied for permission to carry out his action with the Swedish authorities. And while the police initially banned him, a judge awarded Momika the right to continue on June 23, based on Sweden’s principles of free speech. 

Salwan Momika arrived in Sweden in April 2018. Three years later, in April 2021, he received refugee status, according to information sent to our team by the Swedish Migration Agency, the government body in charge of immigration. Momika has a three-year residency permit (set to expire in April 2024). He lives in the small community of Järna, south of the capital. 

Many Muslims reacted in anger to the incident. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened once again to block Sweden from being able to join NATO. 

Former militia member turned political refugee 

On Facebook, Momika describes himself as an “atheist and enlightened politician, thinker and author”. He is active on many social media sites, especially TikTok and Facebook. However, all of his accounts were created after he had refugee status in Sweden. 

Momika has posted dozens of videos online, often with majority-Muslim country names in Arabic as hashtags. This makes it seem likely that he was trying to stir up as much publicity as possible for his Koran burning. 

However, since the burning, old videos of Momika have resurfaced and been circulating online, especially amongst the Iraqi immigrant and refugee community in Sweden. Our team verified the videos, which show a group of men, all wearing black t-shirts, carrying the flag of the Imam Ali Brigades, an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran. 

Inone video – which has been circulating online since June 29, the day after the Koran burning – Momika says that he is the head of a Christian militia within the Brigades of Imam Ali, an organisation created in 2014 and accused of war crimes.

The original video is unavailable online. However, our team was able to verify this excerpt by seeing two other videos from July 2015 and showing the same scene from a different angle. The first was posted on Facebook by the Faucons des forces syriaques (Falcons of the Syriac forces), a militia and the armed branch of the Syriac Democratic Union party, which was founded by Momika in 2014. The second is a video report from the Lebanese channel MTV, published on Youtube in July 2015.

Momika ran this armed group in the outskirts of Mosul in 2017. However, he was locked in a power struggle with Rayan al-Kaldani, the head of another Christian militia, this one called Babylon, then he ended up leaving Iraq, according to the Arabic-language news site Al Araby Al Jadeed. 

The Imam Ali Brigades, whose leader has been under US sanctions since 2018, is one of the many groups operating under the umbrella organisation the Popular Mobilization Forces, a group of militias that have been integrated into the Iraq army since 2016 with the aim of fighting against the Islamic State group organisation. All of these militias get logistical and financial support from Iran. 

Videos have circulated online showing members of the Imam Ali Brigades committing atrocities on members of the Islamic State group organisation. 

When our team contacted the Swedish Migration Agency, they did not want to tell us why they had given Momika asylum. Our team also contacted the Swedish police, who said that they were not able to provide any information because Momika was currently under investigation for “inciting hate”.   

The website of the Swedish Migration Agency says that “persons who have committed certain criminal offences (such as war crimes or other serious crimes), or who pose a threat to the security of Sweden, cannot be granted a residence permit… nor can they be granted asylum under Swedish law”.

While there is no doubt that Momika was part of these militia groups, none of the videos or photos shared online offer proof that he took part in criminal activity.

In a video that began circulating on July 3, 2023, Momika says that his militia had ongoing tensions with other groups within the Popular Mobilization Forces. In the video, he claimed that he was a “victim of the worst acts of torture”, committed by these other groups.   

In an interview with the Swedish newspaper Expressen the day after his Koran burning Momika denied that he had ties to the Popular Mobilization Forces. We reached out to him, but he did not reply to our request for an interview. 

Citizenship application refused

Shortly after his arrival in Sweden, Momika forged links with the Swedish Democrats, a right-wing, ultra-nationalist group, according to an internal document at the Swedish embassy in Baghdad. Hoping to eventually apply for citizenship, Momika supposedly applied for permanent residency, a necessary step in the naturalisation process in Sweden. However, the authorities rejected his request. Authorities said that Momika had been sentenced to community service after having threatened to kill a man while holding a knife.  

Swedish authorities also consider the evolution of the security situation in someone’s home country when making a decision about whether or not to renew someone’s temporary residency permit (Momika’s is set to expire in April 2024).

In a video posted just hours after setting fire to the Koran, Momika criticised Swedish authorities for not providing him with adequate protection. 

More recent videos posted by Momika show him inside a hotel room. He denied that his actions constituted a hate crime, but said that he would participate in a tribunal.

He also announced his intent to repeat his actions, this time burning the Iraqi flag and the Koran in front of the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm next week.