Dissident Spotlight: Salwan Momika
Salwan Momika was shot and killed at his home in Sweden during a livestream in which he burned the Quran.

On Jan. 29, 2025, Salwan Momika was shot and killed during a TikTok livestream at his apartment in Sweden.
Many media reports identified him as the man who staged Quran burnings in Stockholm. They mentioned his previous life as a militia founder in Iraq and the incitement case the Swedish government brought against him. Sweden began by stressing the legality of his Quran-burning protests and sued Momika for incitement of hatred against Muslims. The government dropped the incitement case after Momika’s murder.
While Momika’s past is complicated, his murder is a lesson that there are limits to the speech that Western governments will protect.
Danger in Iraq, Legal Trouble in Sweden
Momika was born in Iraq and raised as a Catholic, making him a religious minority in a country intolerant of people with the wrong religious opinion. A BBC report found that Iraq’s Christian population decreased by 83% from 2003 to 2019. ISIS and its predecessor organizations in Iraq murdered Christians, as the Islamic State of Iraq did in 2010 when they raided a Catholic Church in Baghdad and killed dozens of people.
In 2014, Momika joined a militia to fight ISIS. He joined and fought alongside several militias, including one backed by Iran and accused of human rights violations. He also founded his own militias: the Syriac Democratic Union and the Falcons of the Syriac Forces. However, he lost a 2017 power struggle and fled to Germany.
Momika became an atheist in Germany and emigrated to Sweden as a refugee. There, he reportedly considered running as a candidate in two of Sweden’s right-wing parties. In 2021, he was reported to the police for threatening his flatmate with a knife.
Momika’s greatest legal troubles finally came in 2023 when he staged events where he would burn copies of the Quran. He received permits to conduct these protests in Sweden, but he also received death threats from Muslim-majority countries. In response to Momika’s Quran burnings, Sweden’s embassy in Iraq was stormed twice and Turkey cut off talks with Sweden to join NATO.
Sweden’s patience ran out. At the time of his death, Momika was under investigation for incitement of hatred for his protests.
Blame the Attacker, Not the Protester
There are several things to learn from Momika’s murder.
First, it’s a bad look for a government to have an open investigation into someone who was murdered for his protest. If Sweden is serious about protecting its residents’ rights to free expression, then it should apply to unsympathetic victims as well as sympathetic ones.
I’m against book burning and trolling religious people whose opinions I disagree with. I oppose murdering people for violating conservative religious taboos more.
Second, not every dissident worth celebrating will have a perfect background. Momika was a militia fighter in Iraq and while he may have been fighting against ISIS, he also had connections to an organization backed by Iran. He also served 80 hours of community service for threatening his flatmate.
Whatever he has to be held accountable for in his past, Momika is a victim of religious violence.
Finally, Momika is not to blame for his murder. His killers were responsible for his murder, just as Iraqis were responsible for storming Sweden’s embassy and Recep Erdoğan was responsible for delaying Sweden’s NATO bid. Blaming a refugee — or resident — in another country for unrest in a different one is unreasonable.