Four days after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in , rebel forces seizing Damascus have found massive quantities of Captagon — the drug that in recent years had been almost entirely identified with the former Syrian regime, often referred to as the country’s “national product.”
Syria’s current leader, the most powerful figure among the rebel forces that ousted Assad, had then openly accused the regime of turning Syria into “the world’s largest source of Captagon”. At the same time, he pledged to suppress the production and trafficking of the drug.
However, despite the fall of Assad, the Captagon trade has not disappeared, it has just shifted.
The southern province of Suweida in focus
According to recent investigations and military operations under the name “Operation Jordanian Deterrence” (“Operation Jordanian Deterrence”), the Druze-majority Suwayda province in southern Syria is emerging as a new key Captagon production and trafficking hub.
Despite the fall of Assad, the situation in southern Syria remains extremely fragile, with much of Suwayda province still outside full government control, with clashes and rivalries between local militias, the new government and regional forces.
The situation worries Jordan, which government officials have said views Suweida’s transformation into a drug production center as a matter of national security, given how close it is to its border.
Thus, last Sunday, Jordanian warplanes struck facilities described as drug “factories and laboratories” in southern Syria, in a move that demonstrates the seriousness with which Amman is now dealing with the spread of Captagon.
In fact, Jordan talks about “preemptive defense”, claiming that smuggling networks are now using drones and advanced techniques to even balloons to transport drugs across its borders.
Jordanian government sources have made it clear to Al Jazeera that the kingdom will no longer tolerate the existence of drug production facilities near its borders, while pointing out that the operations are being carried out in coordination with the new Syrian authorities.
What is Captagon
The Captagon pill is a highly addictive amphetamine-type stimulant, produced mainly in Syria and smuggled mainly into the Gulf countries.
It was originally developed in the 1960s by the German company Degussa Pharma Gruppe as a drug to treat disorders such as narcolepsy and attention deficit disorder and contained phenethylline.
In 1986, phenethylline was banned internationally through the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, resulting in the cessation of legal production of Captagon.
However, illegal production never stopped. Part of the stock was smuggled from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, while counterfeit versions of the drug have appeared since the 1990s, mainly through criminal networks in the Balkans and Turkey.
Syria as Captagon’s “kingdom”.
After the outbreak of civil war in 2011 and the international isolation of Damascus, the Syrian economy collapsed. And although the Assad regime has denied any involvement, international analysts argue that Captagon production and trafficking has become a key economic lifeline for the regime.
A report by the New Lines Institute said the Syrian government was leveraging “local alliance structures” with organizations such as Hezbollah, providing technical and operational support to the production and trafficking of the drug.
In the previous decade, Captagon was known as the “drug of Jihad” as it was often found in militant hideouts, and there were reports of its widespread use by ISIS fighters and all sides of the Syrian conflict.
Today, experts estimate that most of the world’s production of Captagon still comes from Syria (about 80% according to a British government report), with Jordan and the rich Gulf countries as the main market.
“Although the Saudi leaders have opposed the regime in Syria for a decade, the purchase of these pills by the youth in Riyadh is financing it,” the Economist wrote characteristically in 2022.
