Video points to Assad regime’s involvement in large-scale trafficking of illicit drugs

By Tim Lister, Kareem Khadder and Nechirvan Mando, CNN

(CNN) — A social media video surfaced Wednesday allegedly showing a warehouse in Syria stacked with captagon, an illicit drug that had transformed the country into a narco-state under former President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

The large warehouse was reportedly located at the headquarters of a military division near Damascus that was commanded by Assad’s brother Maher. CNN is unable immediately to verify the location.

A voice commenting over the video says that it is “one of the largest warehouse facilities of captagon manufacturing of pills.” Piles of pills are seen on the floor along with drug-making equipment.

If confirmed, the discovery would support claims by the United States and others that the Assad regime had been involved in actively exporting the drug. Captagon has become a significant social problem in neighboring Arab nations and spurred some of them to engage in talks with the former Syrian regime to curb its trafficking.

It is a highly addictive drug, mostly containing amphetamine, that is sometimes described as the “poor man’s cocaine.” Studies over recent years have estimated the annual trade in the drug to be worth billions of dollars. It is believed to have become an economic lifeline for the Assad regime while it was under crippling American sanctions.

This week, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya reported the discovery of thousands of captagon pills at the Mazzeh airbase south of Damascus. The purported discovery, which CNN cannot confirm, was made at a branch of Air Force Intelligence, an arm of the Assad regime previously alleged to have been involved in the production and distribution of the drug.

Last year, the US Treasury sanctioned a number of Syrians closely associated with the Assad regime for their alleged involvement captagon trade.

“The Syrian regime and its allies have increasingly embraced the production and trafficking of captagon to generate hard currency, estimated by some to be in the billions of dollars,” the Treasury said.

Among those sanctioned were two cousins of Bashar al Assad and Khalid Qaddour, a close associate of Maher al-Assad who was described as a “key drug producer and facilitator” of captagon production in Syria.

On Sunday, after arriving in Damascus, the leader of the forces that overthrew the regime – Mohammad al Jolani – said Syria had become “the world’s leading source of captagon. But today, Syria is being purified by the grace of God almighty.”

In 2023, the Biden administration drew up a strategy to combat the captagon trade, saying that the vast majority was “produced by local Syrian factions linked to the Assad regime and Hezbollah” and that “large quantities of these captagon pills are shipped from Syrian ports such as Latakia or smuggled across the Jordanian and Iraqi borders.”

Leveraging the captagon trade

According to a report earlier this year by the Carnegie Endowment, the Assad regime and its allies had “leveraged captagon trafficking as a means of exerting pressure on the Gulf states, notably Saudi Arabia, to reintegrate Syria into the Arab world.”

It said production of the drug was “intertwined with the interests of powerful interest groups in Syria, including senior members of the leadership.”

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported last year that “the main departing area for captagon shipments” continued to be in Syria and Lebanon, “with destinations in the Gulf Arab countries reached either directly by land or sea, or indirectly with shipments through other regions.”

The UNODC also reported that the largest seizures of the drug – some two-thirds of the total – had been made in Saudi Arabia. CNN has previously reported on the widespread use of the drug in the kingdom.

In 2022, the Saudi ambassador in Beirut reported that the authorities in the kingdom had confiscated 700 million tablets smuggled from Lebanon since 2014.

Several studies estimate the trade in captagon to have surged over the last decade. The Middle East Institute reported that in 2021, nearly $6 billion of Syria-made captagon was seized abroad, and in April 2022 alone, 25 million captagon pills were intercepted in neighboring countries, worth some $500 million.

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