US designates Nordic neo-Nazi group as terrorists

CNN —

The US State Department on Friday designated a Nordic neo-Nazi group and three of its top officials as terrorists.

It’s the second time in history that the US has designated a foreign White supremacist organization and its leaders as terrorists.

The department designated the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) and three of its top officials – Tor Fredrik Vejdeland, Pär Öberg, and Leif Robert Eklund – as Specially Designated Global Terrorists on Friday, according to a statement from spokesperson Matthew Miller.

It is the first time the Biden administration has made such a designation of a White supremacist group. The Trump administration in 2020 designated the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) and its leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

NRM is a transnational neo-Nazi organization founded in Sweden in 1997, with branches in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland, according to the State Department. It was banned in Finland in 2020.

According to a State Department fact sheet, NRM was designated “for having committed or attempted to commit, posing a significant risk of committing, or having participated in training to commit acts of terrorism that threaten the security of United States nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.”

The designation of NRM comes as US officials have warned that White supremacist terror groups continue to pose a threat at home and abroad. The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community found that the “transnational racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVE) movement, in particular motivated by white supremacy, will continue to foment violence across Europe, South America, Australia, Canada, and