Syrian authorities have seized a massive shipment of the addictive amphetamine-type stimulant Captagon, thwarting a major smuggling operation aimed at neighbouring countries specifically to Iraq, a security official said on Saturday.
The shipment, about three million illicit pills, were confiscated in the northern city of Aleppo, Hussein Hajoli, an official with the General Security directorate said in a statement published in the city’s Telegram Channel.
“As a result of investigation, gathering information, and monitoring individuals, with prior records and suspects, one of our patrols in co-operation with Anti-narcotics Department, managed to arrest two individuals possessing large quantity of narcotic pills,” he said.
As the civil war broke out in 2011 in Syria, millions of Captagon pills were produced under Bashar Al Assad’s regime and shipped to neighbouring countries, accounting for 80 per cent for the world production, according to the New Lines Institute, a Washington-based think tank. The global Captagon market is worth about $10 billion a year.
Despite massive busts, recovering several tonnes of drugs, the trade has fuelled addiction in countries like Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The drugs were a vital source of cash for the heavily sanctioned government. In 2021, the Syrian government is estimated to have made more than $5 billion from the sale of the drug, according to the New Lines Institute.
The proliferation of Captagon through the Middle East is just one of the enduring impacts of the Syrian civil war. Now, the country's new administration, led by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, has promised to tackle the issue.
“Our forces are working with all their might to maintain security and crack down these organised crimes founded by the former regime,” Mr Hajoli said in an interview with a local media outlet.
Last week, Iraq announced the confiscation of an estimated 1.1 tonnes of Captagon pills hidden inside a lorry that entered Iraq from Syria through Turkey, the first major bust since the toppling of Mr Al Assad's regime in December. The shipment, one of the largest seized in Iraq, was monitored and intercepted with the assistance of “important information” provided by Saudi Arabia's drug enforcement agency, ministry spokesman Brig Muqdad Meri said.
Captagon – a mix of amphetamines also referred to as the “poor man’s cocaine” – is one of the more popular recreational drugs among affluent youth in the Middle East. The flow of the drug was one of the main reasons that Arab countries normalised ties with Mr Al Assad's government two years ago, as they sought co-operation in tackling smuggling operations.
Before the ouster of Mr Al Assad, Iran-backed militias used to send machine guns fire and smoke bombs into Jordan to help infiltration by mostly local smugglers with loads of Captagon pills, according to Western Security officials who have been helping the kingdom's armed forces deal with the threat.
Members of the Fourth Armoured Division, controlled by Mr Al Assad's brother Maher facilitated the transportation of drugs through its roadblocks that separate the border from large drug factories near Damascus and in other areas in the interior. Increasingly, the smuggling included weapons, compounding regional concerns.
An officer in a western army said he had witnessed Hezbollah operatives in the Syrian region of Tisia flying drones into the kingdom to help them with reconnaissance. Strongholds of the group in the Bekaa valley are also significant production centres of Captagon, Heroin, Crystal Meth, and Hashish, as well as weapons smuggling and counterfeit currency, regional security officials say.
The removal of the former president dealt a blow to the multibillion dollar a year cross-border trade, easing the security threat to Jordan and to the Arabian Peninsula. Support by the former regime and its Iran-aligned militia backers for the illicit activity vanished. However, substantial quantities of the drug are believed to remain in storage in Syria, with Jordan and Iraq both announcing drug seizures from Syria this month.
The new government in Damascus is controlled by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, a group formerly affiliated with Al Qaeda that is bitterly opposed to Iran, and eager to show Arab powers that it can be a reliable security ally.
Last month, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Syria’s interim President Ahmad Al Shara, who also heads HTS agreed to work together to secure their common border against arms smuggling and drug trafficking. The visit was followed by a security meeting in Amman of senior officials from Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, who agreed to form a joint operations room to exchange information.
The new authorities are pursuing international legitimacy, and are in desperate need for reconstruction funds and the lifting of Western sanctions. An HTS official said the fighting along the borders with Lebanon, broke out last week, sparked by a Syrian anti-narcotics raid into the Bekaa, a centre of drug production which is under Hezbollah's protection.
Rayan Maarouf, a Syrian researcher at the Suwayda24 network of citizen journalists told The National that increased smuggling attempts into Jordan this month have coincided with apparent attempts to reactivate supply lines from Lebanon.
Houses in the Suweida governorate, on the border with Jordan, were damaged by Jordanian army fire as it countered infiltration attempts.
“In the first stage after the regime’s fall, there were attempts to smuggle drugs that were in storage. Now smuggling networks from Lebanon appear to be trying to reactivate,” Mr Maarouf said.
He added: “It will be difficult to stop smuggling completely amid the instability we are seeing in Syria”.
Saud Al Sharafat, a prominent Jordanian security specialist, said that Hezbollah could be too weak to rebuild the networks that had allowed the industrial scale manufacturing and transportation of Captagon in the last several years.
The group's current “focus on survival” means that any plans for alternative logistical networks and production centres to compensate for the loss of Syria may have to wait, said Mr Al Sharafat, a former Brigadier General in Jordanian Intelligence.
“There will always be smuggling activity motivated by economics, but the Iranian-planned targeting of Jordan that was beginning to cause fatigue on the border is largely over,” said Mr Al Sharafat who heads the Shorufat Centre for Globalisation and Terrorism Studies in Amman.
HTS “wants to show good intentions and bring in international aid, and the world is slowly responding [positively] to them,” Mr Al Sharafat said. “They don’t want to re-open the routes to the smugglers”.
However, he cautioned that Iraq could possibly still pose a source for illicit activity in the medium term, especially if the US follows its strikes on Iran's Houthi allies in Yemen with attacks on its proxies in Iraq, which borders both Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
“Iraq is left as the only outlet for Iran”, he said, adding that the Iraqi militias are well versed in the border terrain, although there is no evidence yet that the country is filling the vacuum left by the loss to Iran in Syria.
