Reader ‘pungentpeppers’ tells us a story from August that we didn’t know about—two Swedish citizens, brothers, of Lebanese descent joined the Jihad in Syria by traveling there using their travel-the-world-free card, a Swedish passport. Our reader asks if Sweden bears any responsibility for allowing its citizens to go to another country to kill people? A question that should be asked of the US State Department and Homeland Security too, should it turn out that we also gave citizenship to Somali refugees who then traveled on a US passport to kill scores of innocent shoppers in Kenya.
The story bears an eerie resemblance to the Tsarnaev Boston Bomber family except that these brothers didn’t kill their fellow citizens. Emphasis is mine.
A pair of Swedish brothers, one of them a suicide bomber and the other a jihadi fighter, entered Syria by way of Lebanon, using their Swedish passports. The younger brother, named Moatassem al-Hassan, age 18, blew himself up this past August in a suicide bombing at a Syrian army checkpoint in the province of Homs. The other, Hassan al-Hassan, 20, was killed in a related military operation against the Syrian army. Both brothers were fighting for a radical Islamic group named Jund al-Sham with links to al-Qaeda.
While still in Sweden just a year ago, Hassan, the elder brother, had started his university studies. And had he stayed in Scandinavia, Moatasem would have started his degree this year. “But they left everything and travelled back to Mankubeen, where their parents have been living for two years now,” said Jihad, a cousin. [This family resemble the Tsarnaevs. One son started college, but didn’t continue, and both mom and dad had left their sons behind when they returned to live in the good old country.]
“And like Tamerlan Tsarnaev who traveled to Chechnya where it is believed he received terrorist training, these brothers traveled to Lebanon to learn the terrorist trade. However, unlike the Tsarnaevs, they never made it back to the West.”
The brothers were members of a large Lebanese Sunni family who are known for violence. Their brother Rabih died in street fighting in Lebanon. Their uncle Saddam, a man with close ties to Al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahri, blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Tripoli, Lebanon. Another uncle, Youssef al-Hajj Dib, is serving a life sentence in Germany after he planted two bombs on passenger trains. A catastrophe was averted because those bombs failed to detonate. Perhaps it was a blessing for Sweden that these two Swedish citizens left and did not come back. For if they had returned to Sweden, they might have emulated their uncle Youssef, the “suitcase bomber”, and tried to blow up a train or two.
Doesn’t the Swedish government bear any responsibility? It allowed its citizens to go to another country and kill their citizens. Is the purpose of citizenship just to give a passport to someone so that they can gain financial benefit and ease of travel? The recipient need show neither responsibility nor commitment to Sweden? What type of perverted “citizenship” is this?
Although they are Swedish citizens, Middle Easterners consider these two “martyrs” to be Lebanese. Their homicidal acts in Syria threatened the stability of Lebanon and pushed that poor country towards the same road of terrible destruction faced by the Syrians. These brothers were handed all of the advantages that life in Sweden offered: money, a chance to study, the opportunity to create a good life. But Islam and Martyrdom, and Jihad in a country that is not your own, were more important than Swedish peace and secularism.
‘Pungentpeppers’ sent us three links, here, here, and here to read the details of the sorry tale.
My solution: If you can’t sort them out in advance, you don’t let any of them in!
Readers we have written many many posts on the mess Sweden is in. Go here to learn more.
Also, we have a category that we haven’t used much lately entitled “comments worth noting” for readers who submit a comment that is worth posting more visibly, like this one.