The Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, enjoyed on Friday (19), after almost 12 years of geopolitical isolation, the pleasure of returning to occupy one of the seats at the summit of the Arab League. Returning to the throne, however, did not come cheap. To be accepted back into the regional alliance, Assad needed to hand over a finger of what experts call “the most modern narco-state in the world”: a billionaire operation for the production and distribution of Captagon – a type of amphetamine that invaded the countries of the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean in recent years, and on the streets it is known as the “drug of Jihad”.
Stuffed in bags of flour, tea, pomegranates and even glued between layers of laminate flooring, the pills travel from laboratories concentrated on the Lebanese-Syrian border to keep guerrillas awake and not hungry in North Africa, Iraq and Jordan, but mainly to warm up prominent parties of Saudi Arabia’s wealthy youth.
From there, to reach Greece and Italy across the Mediterranean, it’s a short hop away, which consequently triggered the global geopolitical alarm. The US, for example, last year published an act deeming Captagon a transnational threat. The UK government, for its part, has sanctioned individuals linked to the drug’s production, stating that 80% of the world’s Captagon is produced in Syria and is a “financial lifeline” for the Assad regime, “worth approximately three times the combined trade of the Mexican cartels”.
It’s not for less. In recent years, pill seizures have become more frequent and in exorbitant numbers. An investigation at the end of 2021, from the American newspaper The New York Timesshowed that more than 250 million Captagon pills were seized worldwide that year, an amount 18 times greater than that seized in 2018.
In September 2022, the police in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, announced that they had seized, in a single operation, more than 47 million pills of “poor people’s cocaine”, the final straw for an Islamic nation where drugs are considered huge taboo. . In February 2023, a man was arrested at Abu Dhabi airport, in the United Arab Emirates, after trying to smuggle, alone, 4.5 million Captagon pills in cans of green beans.
In an attempt to contain the amphetamine invasion, it was necessary to resort to diplomatic bargaining: on May 1st, at a meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Amman, Syrian representatives were pressured (and yielded) by Saudi Arabia, but also by the Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, to take “the necessary measures to end smuggling at the borders” and to take “the fight against drugs seriously”. Days later, these same ministers voted for Syria’s readmission to the Arab League. Less than 24 hours later, Jordan launched an airstrike in southern Syria, killing Marai Al-Ramthan and his family, considered by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights “the most prominent drug trafficker and smuggler in the region”.
Currency trading
The al-Assad government denies having any control over its production, but there is mounting evidence linking the drug to the economic livelihood of the regime, which has been under international sanctions for a decade since the Arab Spring’s violent crackdowns that resulted in a bloody war. civilian, with almost half a million dead.
One report of newlines institute from Washington, dated April last year, traced the close relationship of the Bashar al-Assad regime with the drug and estimated that the profits revolve around US$ 2 to US$ 5 billion (up to R$ 28 billion). The document identified at least 15 large-scale production laboratories operating in government-controlled areas.
The study signed by experts Caroline Rose and Alexander Söderholm also points to Bashar al-Assad’s brother, Maher al-Assad, as one of the main leaders of this operation. Maher was linked with overseeing a Captagon factory in Latakia, Syria’s main port city, and manufacturing centers along the Lebanese border in the Qalamoun mountain range. “Syrian government elements are key factors in the Captagon trade, with ministerial-level complicity in production and smuggling, using the trade as a means of political and economic survival in the face of international sanctions,” the investigators wrote.
In an article for the Carnegie Endowment Institute for International Peace, investigative journalist specializing in Syrian affairs Taim Alhajj explained that international sanctions against the Syrian regime played a major role in depleting its financial resources and increasing the government’s desperation, leading them to sponsor drug trafficking networks.
This decision placed Syria, in record time, at the top of the list of drug exporting countries in the world. “Hezbollah is among groups operating on Syrian soil to regulate Captagon’s trade. Media reports confirm that some areas in which Hezbollah wields great influence, including Syrian-Lebanese border villages, play a key role in the operations of smuggling. It appears that the Syrian regime has decided to leverage the experience that Hezbollah has gained in controlling drug production and smuggling from the Beqaa Valley in southern Lebanon to support its own burgeoning Captagon industry,” he explained.
In the 1960s, Captagon was sold by prescription in the West as an antidepressant and to treat a range of disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, due to its high addictive power, the substance was included in the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and most countries discontinued its use. In 2011, the International Narcotics Control Council even stated that Captagon production had been abolished worldwide, pointing only to the existence of scarce stocks, mainly in Bulgaria.
Eventually, new counterfeit pills reappeared in the Middle East. Today, each pill typically sells for an average of $5 in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, and $25 in Saudi Arabia. However, soldiers and young students can get the drug for less than $1.
A finger but not an arm
A People’s Gazette, security and foreign policy expert at the Strobe Talbott center, Vanda Felbab-Brown, expressed skepticism about the power of diplomatic bargaining to curb the drug trade in the Gulf. The scholar explained that currently Syria does not have any product or service that could offset the approximate US$ 2 billion in damages that a possible suppression of drug trafficking would entail for the regime. “There is nothing that can pay off economically. So I think it’s very unlikely that the regime will just give up. My expectation is that from time to time, when there is intense criticism, like from the Gulf countries or Jordan, the al-Assad regime will will carry out some operations, mainly against commercial rivals and independent dealers, as a front demonstration that they are cracking down on production.”
Brown explained that the Jordanian operation that resulted in the death of Marai Al-Ramthan last week, in Syrian territory, is an example of this. “It is possible that, for this operation, al-Assad provided information to the Jordanians or that the regime gave the go-ahead for the bombing to take place. It is also possible that Jordan simply felt it had both the right and the ability to do so. without authorization, due to diplomatic negotiations with Syria”, he details.
“However, Al-Ramtan was an important drug lord, but he is certainly not at the top of the hierarchy. Assad’s brother, head of the Special Forces Division, is perhaps the most important player associated with the drug trade, besides Assad himself. Therefore, I would say that there are figures of greater relevance to be faced at the top of political power in Syria, and I do not believe that there will be big changes in that, even with the re-entry into the Arab League”, he concluded.
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