The collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime has released its millions of pills. Every day, in hangars or military bases, rebels discover more captagon, the drug that has transformed Syria into a narco-state.
“After a search, we understood that it was a factory of Maher al-Assad (the brother of the ex-president, editor's note) and his associate Amer Khiti,” explains Abou Malek al-Chami to AFP, a fighter from the coalition led by the Islamist rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who surprised the whole world by taking Syria in a dozen days.
Video“It’s the jungle”: the captagon market in Syria told by a trafficker
Carried away by the wave, Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow to his great ally. His brother Maher is nowhere to be found. Highly feared head of the Fourth Division, the elite unit of the Syrian army, he is considered one of the heads of the Syrian captagon network, an industry worth at least 10 billion dollars. As for MP Amer Khiti, he is under sanctions from Washington and London, the latter accusing him of “facilitating the production and trafficking of drugs”.
A means of pressure on the Gulf States
In the hangars of a quarry bordering Damascus, Abu Malek al-Chami – a nom de guerre – continues the visit. The ramps of the underground garage were until recently used to load millions of dirty beige pills cleverly hidden in the copper coils of commercially sold electrical boxes. “It’s impossible to describe because there were so many machines full of captagon ready for export,” continues Abou Malek.
In the hangar, the boxes that were used to disguise the contents of the drug truck shipments are still there; like bags of caustic soda – from Saudi Arabia according to the labels – the main ingredient in methamphetamine, a stimulant like captagon.
These drugs had become, by far, the main export product of the Syria of Bashar al-Assad, an international pariah after 14 years of bloody repression of a revolt that became a civil war having killed more than half a million people. dead.
In addition to a juicy financial windfall, the captagon also provided a lever of diplomatic pressure to the president, who was for a time unable to leave Syria as he was persona non grata in most of the world's capitals.
Bashar al-Assad “used captagon trafficking to put pressure on the Gulf States, in particular Saudi Arabia, to reintegrate Syria into the Arab world,” assures researcher Hesham Alghannam of the Carnegie Middle East Center. Because in the chaos of the war, this drug spread well beyond the Syrian borders.
Drugs set on fire
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is the largest market. There, captagon is both the party drug of the wealthy elite but also that, discreet and less taboo than alcohol in this conservative country, of modest workers looking for stimulants to keep up with the infernal pace of their employers.
For the researcher, it is by exploiting these addictions that the regime rejoined the Arab League in 2023. Shortly before his fall, the president – elected in 2000 by referendum to succeed his father Hafez al-Assad – was even received again with great fanfare in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh.
Despite everything, Syria continued to mass-produce millions of captagon tablets, an amphetamine derived from a drug supposed to treat narcolepsy or attention deficit disorder. The proof? At the Mazzeh military airport, on the outskirts of Damascus, HTS fighters recently burned thousands of captagon tablets under a hangar.
In another Air Force building, amid counterfeit Viagra tablets and poor imitation hundred-dollar bills, bags of dirty beige pills pile up. All these buildings are linked to one man: the all-powerful brother of the deposed president. “Upon entering, we discovered an enormous quantity of captagon. We burned everything,” says an HTS fighter who calls himself Khattab.
HTS, which intends to manage post-Assad Syria with its interim government, will, it assures, cease the production and export of captagon – a business whose revenues exceeded all of Syria's legal exports combined. A challenge in a country with industry on its knees, a currency in free fall and until now still excluded from international trade by sanctions against the Assad clan and its cronies.
