MÉRIDA, Mexico.- The collapse of the Syrian regime Bashar al-Assad has shed light on the controversial trade in Captagon, a synthetic drug that has flooded the black market throughout the Middle East and behind which the dictator’s brother would be.
The rebelsled by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, claim to have found a vast cache of the narcotic and have committed to destroying it, according to a note from the agency. AFP.
Islamist fighters seized military bases and distribution centers for the amphetamine-type stimulant. As shown in images shared by AFPin a warehouse located in a quarry on the outskirts of Damascus there were millions of Captagon pills hidden inside electrical components destined for export and industrial quantities of chemical components.
One of the rebels explained to AFP journalists that the factory was linked to Maher al-Assad and Amer Khiti.
Maher al-Assad, brother of Bashar al-Assad, and formercommander soldier who allegedly fled the country, would be at the head of the lucrative Captagon trade.
The Syrian politician Khiti, also linked to drug trafficking of this substance, was sanctioned in 2023 by the British government, which stated that “he controls multiple businesses in Syria that facilitate the production and smuggling of drugs.”
“We found a large number of devices that were filled with packets of Captagon pills intended to be smuggled out of the country. It is a huge amount. It’s impossible to know,” said one of the fighters when showing the drug shipment.
In cardboard boxes, traffickers camouflaged their cargo as pallets of normal merchandise, along with bags of caustic soda, a key ingredient in the production of methamphetamine, another stimulant.
For years, neighboring countries accused the Assad regime of being behind the world’s largest Captagon production and export operation, a claim the regime denied until the last day.
In 2021, Gulf countries banned all imports of agricultural products from Lebanon after repeated shipments were discovered containing fake fruits and vegetables filled with Captagon believed to have come from Syria.
The author of an investigation of the Carnegie Middle East Center It is estimated that the Al-Assad regime obtained millions of dollars annually from the trade, a value several times greater than that of amphetamine.
They also believe Assad used the threat of drug-fueled unrest to pressure Arab governments.
Assad, the expert wrote, “took advantage of the Captagon trade as a means of putting pressure on the Gulf States, especially Saudi Arabia, to reintegrate Syria into the Arab world,” which he did in 2023 when he rejoined the League bloc. Arab.
