These days, Ninous Toma runs an exceedingly busy operation, each week receiving more members along with their families. He’s president of the youth division at Assyriska FF, a leading Swedish football club, and most of the young new players have recently arrived from Syria. “While the kids play, the parents use the time to ask each other about how things work here in Sweden”, he reports. “And we try to help some of the kids who’re traumatised.”

Traumatised kids, a bustling football club named Assyriska (Assyrian, a Christian minority in Syria, Iraq and Turkey): this is Södertälje, the Stockholm suburb that has become a mirror of the Middle East as persecuted minorities flee their homes. Since 2003, this city of now 91,000 residents has welcomed more than 8,000 refugees, mostly from Iraq and Syria. This year alone some 1,200 refugees – 90% of them Syrians – have arrived here. Because Swedish law allows refugees to choose where to settle, thousands of Middle Eastern Christians opt for Södertälje, for the past several decades home to a small but growing community Middle Eastern Christian community.

And since Sweden’s pioneering 2013 law that grants permanent residence to all Syrian asylum seekers, Syrians have quickly become the country’s largest refugee group. During the first quarter of this year, 3,475 Syrians applied for aslym in Sweden, followed by 1,139 Somalis and 884 Kosovars. “The continuing war in Syria has developed into the largest refugee disaster of modern times”, says Pierre Karatzian, a spokesman for the Swedish Migration Board. “We estimate that 80,000-105,000 individuals will apply for asylum in Sweden this year, of whom we estimate 37,000 will be from Syria.”

More here.