The dramatic collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime has thrown gentle into the darkish corners of his rule, together with the industrial-scale export of the banned drug captagon.
Victorious Islamist-led fighters have seized navy bases and distribution hubs for the amphetamine-type stimulant, which has flooded the black market throughout the Center East.
Led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, the rebels say they discovered an unlimited haul of medication and vowed to destroy them.
On Wednesday, HTS fighters allowed Afp journalists right into a warehouse at a quarry on the outskirts of Damascus, the place captagon drugs have been hid inside electrical elements for export.
“After we entered and did a sweep, and we discovered that it is a manufacturing facility for Maher al-Assad and his associate Amer Khiti,” stated black-masked fighter Abu Malek al-Shami.
– Family home equipment –
Maher al-Assad was a navy commander and the deposed strongman’s brother, now presumed on the run. He’s broadly accused of being the ability behind the profitable captagon commerce.
Syrian politician Khiti was positioned underneath sanction in 2023 by the British authorities, which stated he “controls a number of companies in Syria which facilitate the manufacturing and smuggling of medication”.
In a cavernous storage beneath the warehouse and loading bays, hundreds of dusty beige captagon drugs have been packed into the copper coils of name new family voltage stabilisers.
“We discovered numerous units that have been filled with packages of captagon drugs meant to be smuggled in another country. It is an enormous amount. It is unimaginable to inform,” Shami stated.
Above, within the warehouse, crates of cardboard containers stood prepared to permit the traffickers to disguise their cargo as pallet-loads of normal items, alongside sacks and sacks of caustic soda.
Caustic soda, or sodium hydroxide, is a key ingredient within the manufacturing of methamphetamine, one other stimulant.
Assad fell on the weekend to a lightning HTS offensive, however the income from promoting captagon propped up Assad’s authorities all through Syria’s 13 years of civil warfare.
Captagon turned Syria into the world’s largest narco state. It turned by far Syria’s greatest export, dwarfing all its authorized exports put collectively, in response to estimates drawn from official knowledge by AFP throughout a 2022 investigation.
Specialists — just like the creator of a July report from the Carnegie Center East Middle — additionally consider that Assad used the specter of drug-fuelled unrest to place strain on Arab governments.
Captagon fuelled an epidemic of drug abuse in rich Gulf states, at the same time as Assad sought methods to finish his diplomatic isolation amongst his friends, wrote Carnegie scholar Hesham Alghannam.
– ‘Big quantity, brother’ –
Assad, he wrote, “leveraged captagon trafficking as a method of exerting strain on the Gulf states, notably Saudi Arabia, to reintegrate Syria into the Arab world”, which it did in 2023 when it rejoined the Arab League bloc.
The caustic soda on the warehouse, within the Damascus suburbs, was equipped from Saudi Arabia, in response to labelling on the sacks.
The warehouse haul was large, however smaller and nonetheless spectacular stashes of captagon have additionally turned up in navy services related to items underneath Maher Assad’s command.
Journalists from AFP this week discovered a bonfire of captagon drugs on the grounds of the Mazzeh air base, now within the palms of HTS fighters who descended on the capital Damascus from the north.
Behind the smouldering heap, in a ransacked air pressure constructing, extra captagon lay alongside different illicit exports, together with off-brand Viagra impotence cures and poorly-forged $100 payments.
“As we entered the realm we discovered an enormous amount of captagon. So we destroyed it and burned it. It is an enormous quantity, brother,” stated an HTS fighter utilizing the nom de guerre “Khattab”.
“We destroyed and burned it as a result of it is dangerous to individuals. It harms nature and other people and people.”
Khattab additionally pressured that HTS, which has fashioned a transitional authorities to exchange the collapsed administration, doesn’t need to hurt its neighbours by exporting the drug — a commerce price billions of {dollars}.
