“We found these tablets here, they are Captagon”, explains a reporter for “Al Jazeera”, standing in front of a large warehouse at the Maze military airport near Damascus. These are small opaque bags full of white tablets, ARD reports.
The drug business is headed by Assad's brother
After the fall of the regime, rebel groups discovered one of the main factories for the production of Captagon - warehouses, equipment and containers with tablets.
The military airport was also the base of the elite Fourth Division, led by the younger brother of former Syrian President Assad. Maher Assad is believed to have played a leading role in the Captagon business.
Bashar Assad has turned Syria into a kind of narco-state: the Captagon trade has become one of the most important sources of income and a crucial economic factor that has supported the country financially devastated by the civil war and sanctions.
The demand for Captagon is high
Captagon is a synthetic drug in tablet form, which is consumed mainly in Arab countries. It is usually a mixture of amphetamine and caffeine, but various derivatives of it are also on the market. As a former drug user from Syria told ARD: “First you feel good, suddenly you gain great self-confidence, you can talk a lot. But then come the depressions and hallucinations.
A tablet can be bought in Syria and elsewhere for just a few dollars - a cheap "pleasure" with serious health consequences.
A network of cartels
At the beginning of the 21st century, the illegal production of Captagon increasingly shifted to the Middle East, experts from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation have found. In 2010, the center of production of this type of drug was Lebanon.
The stimulant is also increasingly used by fighters of various militias, including those of the Hezbollah group. The Iranian-backed organization, a close ally of the Assad regime, was closely linked to the production and trade of Captagon.
Due to the civil war in Syria and the subsequent sanctions, as well as the loss of control over significant parts of the country, the regime in Damascus needed new sources of funds. In the Captagon trade, the Assad clan found such a source of steady income, we also read in the publication of the German publication.
The drug has been flooding the Arabian Peninsula for several years, mainly Saudi Arabia. But after investigators began to control the main routes from Syria to Jordan and Iraq, traffickers looked for new routes - to Europe, ARD points out.
The end of Assad does not mean the end of Captagon
Mahmoud Jaraba, an expert on organized crime at the Research Center for Islam and Law in Europe, believes that after the fall of the Assad regime, more information will be available about the networks for distributing Captagon, about the structures, logistics and actors. This will allow the fight against the trade in Captagon to be conducted more targeted.
But it is not yet known to what extent international authorities will cooperate with the new Syrian government. Given that the Assad regime is already gone and the Hezbollah militias are seriously weakened due to the war with Israel, a shift to Europe, including Germany, is not ruled out, says the expert quoted by ARD.
He suspects that with the fall of the regime, former Assad supporters may flee to Europe, including people who are “directly or indirectly connected to the trade”. That is, the end of Assad definitely does not mean the end of the Captagon trade, ARD adds.