In the Middle East, the trafficking of captagon, an amphetamine derived from an ancient drug of the same name of which Syria is the main producer and Saudi Arabia the main consumer, has been worth around 5.7 billion dollars – around 5.1 billion euros – in 2021, according to a report by the Newlines Institute revealed by AFP then relayed by several media, including the Syrian site Enab Baladi.
This amount, a marked increase from the estimated $3.5 billion in profit for 2020, is only based on the value of the 420 million pills whose seizure has been made public. This report points the finger “the involvement of Bashar Al-Assad’s family and his main collaborators within the regime alongside Hezbollah [libanais] in the manufacture and smuggling of captagon”.
“A means of survival” for Damascus
According to the report, the economic sanctions imposed on the Syrian regime since the start of the conflict, which has torn the country apart since 2011, have prompted Damascus to resort to “traffic [de captagon] as a means of political and economic survival”.
Moreover, one of the main beneficiaries of this traffic is none other than Maher El-Assad, the brother of the Syrian president and head of the fourth division of the Syrian army, as indicated in an article by New York Times published last December and quoted by Enab Baladi.
These high-ranking members of the regime rely, in the structure of the traffic, on armed militias such as that of the Lebanese pro-Iranian party Hezbollah, present on the border between Syria and Lebanon and already seasoned in the production and smuggling of cannabis. in the Bekaa Valley [est du Liban, zone frontalière de la Syrie]which the “party of God” has always denied.