Captagon was a vital source of revenue for the Assad regime and became one of the country’s biggest exports under its rule [Getty]
The extent of the Assad regime’s drug trafficking operations continues to be uncovered in Syria, with new footage published by Turkish state media appearing to show another Captagon factory it says is linked to the family of Syria’s ousted former president, Bashar al-Assad.
In the days since Assad’s overthrow, local and international media have published a stream of videos revealing the network of drug manufacturing complexes across Syria, including the methods that smugglers used to traffic the pills across the country’s borders.
The latest video published by Anadolu Agency was taken at a villa in al-Dimas, a town close to the Lebanese border in Damascus province, showing rooms filled with industrial machinery and dozens of barrels of raw materials used to manufacture and store the drug.
Anadolu said it had confirmed that the property belonged to Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and one of the most powerful figures in the former Ba’athist regime.
Captagon—dubbed ‘the poor man’s cocaine’—is a stimulant similar to amphetamine and was a vital source of revenue for the Assad regime amid the economic devastation caused by almost 14 years of war and crippling sanctions.
It became one of the country’s biggest exports worth billions of dollars a year as regime-linked traffickers shipped the drug overseas, primarily to the Gulf. It was also a popular drug among fighters in the country’s civil war.
The network was reportedly under the control of Maher and his Fourth Armoured Division—an elite military formation and major player in the country’s shadow economy.
Hezbollah—the Iran-backed Shia militant group that fought alongside Assad’s forces in the war—is also thought to be active in the cross-border drugs trade, though it has always denied this.
The US and EU have placed strict sanctions on Syrian officials and organisations believed to be involved in the manufacture of the drug.
Syria’s participation in the drug trade was a point of tension in Assad’s relations with the Gulf, to which millions of pills were shipped every year, and Jordan, which was a main transit country for traffickers. Assad had vowed to curb production in return for normalisation with Arab states but failed to deliver on his promises.
