Drug dwarfed all legal exports put together, with Assad’s brother widely believed to be power behind lucrative trade
A Syrian rebel fighter holds a container of Captagon pills, a brand name of the psychostimulant Fenethylline, discovered at a drug manufacturing facility in the city of Douma on the eastern outskirts of Damascus on 12 December 2024.A Syrian rebel fighter holds a container of Captagon pills, a brand name of the psychostimulant Fenethylline, discovered at a drug manufacturing facility in the city of Douma on the eastern outskirts of Damascus on 12 December 2024.
HTS fighters allowed AFP journalists into a warehouse at a quarry on the outskirts of Damascus, where captagon pills were concealed inside electrical components for export.A black-masked fighter, Abu Malek al-Shami, A black-masked fighter Abu Malek al-Shami claimed the factory was linked to Maher al-Assad and Amer Khiti.
“We found a large number of devices that were stuffed with packages of captagon pills meant to be smuggled out of the country. It’s a huge quantity. It’s impossible to tell,” Shami said. Experts – like the author of a July report from the Carnegie Middle East Center – also believe that Assad used the threat of drug-fuelled unrest to put pressure on Arab governments., notably Saudi Arabia, to reintegrate Syria into the Arab world”, which it did in 2023 when it rejoined the Arab League bloc.
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