Why do young men, who have grown up in the safe bosom of Scandinavia, want to sacrifice their lives for Allah? That is the question posed by a Swedish documentary that provides a glimpse into the world of young European Muslims who dedicate themselves to jihad, or holy war. Aching Heart, which  will open in Sweden on Oct 19 has already gained much attention.

Part of the film is the story of two young Swedes with immigrant backgrounds — one from Ostermalm, one of Stockholm’s poshest neighbourhoods, and one from Kvanum, a tiny town in central Sweden — who left their homes in the 1990s to seek martyrdom in the wars of Chechnya and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But most of the focus of the film is on Goteborg, Sweden’s second-biggest city. This is where Mirsad Bektasevic grew up. The 20-year-old Swede with Bosnian roots was given an eight-year sentence in Sarajevo this summer for planning a suicide attack there in 2005.

The opening scene of Aching Heart is a video found with Bektasevic when he was arrested: Two balaclava-clad men show off a stash of weapons, including hand grenades and suicide belts. Oscar Hedin, the director, gained the trust of some of Bektasevic’s friends and “jihadi brothers” in Goteborg.

Meeting these young men up close is, as Hedin makes clear, both frightening and reassuring. Apart from Bektasevic, no one in the film issues a direct threat against Sweden or any other target, but the underlying message is clearly militant. In one segment, Hedin followed Lennart; a 29-year-old convert friend of Bektasevic’s who is also known by his online pseudonym, Abu Usama el Swede, to Sarajevo to visit his friend in jail. While there, Lennart meets Abu Hamza, a Syrian veteran of the Bosnian war, and their discussion turns to jihad.
Hedin has chosen the title Aching Heart to underscore how all these “regular guys” have histories that viewers can relate to, histories that might provide some of the keys to solving the problem of Islamic radicalism in the West.

Lennart, who spends much of his time spreading jihadist material online — he was part of the Scotland Yard investigation into the “cyber jihadist” Younis Tsouli, who was given a 10-year sentence in London this year — is a former skinhead who converted to Islam while in jail.

The film follows him as he shows the place where he beat up an Iranian immigrant as a neo-Nazi teenager. Hedin finds something broken in these mens’ backgrounds — an abusive father, drugs, divorce — and a longing for a twisted kind of redemption.

In this aim to understand what drives young, radicalised European Muslims, Hedin gets support from academics who have studied the phenomenon of Islamic radicalisation.

“To deal with this, it is necessary to know where these people are coming from, why they think what they think and do what they do,” said Magnus Norell, a terrorism researcher at the Swedish Defence Research Agency.



IHT