2023-10-08 07:00:08
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (right) and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad (left) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, May 19, 2023. SYRIAN PRESIDENCY / VIA REUTERS
Kaftagon is the name of a recently opened restaurant in the center of Damascus, a few hundred meters from the government presidency and the ministry of foreign affairs. Even though the establishment specializes in kafta, the lamb skewer, the allusion to captagon, a highly addictive amphetamine, is all the clearer as the restaurant’s motto is ” Get addicted ».
In a capital where nothing escapes the vigilance of the regime’s services, such a slogan sounds like an additional provocation from the Syrian dictatorship towards all the States which believed in its promises of moderation in the production of captagon. But the billions of dollars or euros generated by the manufacture and trafficking of this drug weigh much more than the commitments made by Bashar Al-Assad to the sovereigns of the Arabian Peninsula.
The affront to the petromonarchies
Mohammed Ben Salman, the crown prince but de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, affirmed his country’s pre-eminence in the Arab world during the summit of Arab heads of state held in Jeddah last May. The return of Bashar Al-Assad to the Arab concert, from which he had been excluded twelve years earlier, was the major event of this summit, even if it was partly eclipsed by President Zelensky’s invitation to express exceptionally on the Ukrainian war.
Such an invitation, like the rehabilitation of Assad, bears the personal mark of the young Saudi leader, determined to move forward with his country’s national interests as his sole compass. Captagon, a doping agent originally based on fenetylline, has in fact become so popular in Saudi Arabia that it now poses a serious public health problem.
Read the column: Article reserved for our subscribers Will Assad’s impunity extend to drug trafficking?
The debate over the priority to be given to the fight against the supply or demand of narcotics is well known to Western societies. The Saudi authorities, in a country where drug addiction remains a taboo, have chosen to rely on Damascus’ commitments to curb the production of captagon (the United States accuses the Syrian dictatorship of being, alone, responsible for ‘at least 80% of global captagon manufacturing). It was a misunderstanding of the capacity to Bashar Al-Assad playing arsonist firefighters and, therefore, to create problems for which it imposes itself as the only solution.
Such a strategy had already been very profitable for his father, Hafez Al-Assad, on the subject of terrorism, which the Syrian regime encouraged with a view to paradoxically appearing as the only recourse in the face of this threat. A comparable trap has just closed on the Gulf States which believed in the moderating virtues of normalization with Damascus, while quite the opposite is currently happening.
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