Bashar al-Assad has propped up his regime by exploiting the Middle East’s love of an amphetamine called captagon.
Before Marai al-Ramthan started the job that made him rich and got him killed, he was a sheepherder. A handsome and resourceful man in his thirties, he lived in southern Syria, in the scrubby area near Jordan, and had family on both sides of the border. There is a long tradition of petty smuggling in the region. His surname is derived from Ar-Ramtha, a city on the northern edge of Jordan which grew prosperous through the illicit transit of goods in and out of the country.
Until the civil war in Syria began, in 2011, a group of Jordanians known as bahhara (or “sailors”) were licensed to drive taxis across the border. There were about eight hundred such drivers, and everybody understood the real purpose of their journeys: to return to Jordan, where the cost of living is sixty per cent higher than in Syria, with cheap goods. The bahhara brought back fresh produce, cigarettes, and other everyday items, and sold them at a considerable profit. Jordanian customs officials and the bahhara had an informal deal: for a bribe, a driver could bring trunk loads of Syrian products into the country tax free.
When the civil war broke out, rebels opposing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad seized control of the city of Daraa, across the border from Ar-Ramtha. As the two sides fought in the streets, the bahhara trade came to a standstill. According to a report by the Carnegie Middle East Center, eighty per cent of Ar-Ramtha’s stores had closed by 2017. The following year, Assad’s forces recaptured Daraa, and the border crossing reopened. Many of the bahhara resumed their old profession. A few locals pursued a more lucrative opportunity: drugs. Marai al-Ramthan was one such entrepreneur. He began moving large volumes of captagon, an amphetamine, into Jordan. To avoid checkpoints, he hired Bedouins to transport the drug through the desert. Before long, he had an army of hundreds of smugglers.
Syria has now endured thirteen years of civil war. More than half a million Syrians have died in the fighting; five million have fled abroad. The country’s infrastructure and legitimate economy have been shattered, and the regime is heavily sanctioned internationally. But, with the support of Iran and Russia, Assad has survived, and his government now controls about three-quarters of the country. In the past few years, he has found a desperately needed source of income in captagon.
In Syria, a single pill of the stimulant costs a few cents to produce. But that pill can be sold elsewhere in the Middle East—the only part of the world where captagon is a popular drug—for as much as twenty-five dollars, especially in wealthy cities such as Riyadh. The margins of the business are high enough that exporters can be unsuccessful as often as not and still reap giant profits. The Assad regime now controls much of the captagon trade, making billions of dollars a year. The most significant figure in the government’s production and distribution of captagon is reportedly the President’s younger brother Maher al-Assad, who is the head of the 4th Division of the Syrian Army, a unit founded in 1984 to protect the government from all threats to its authority. Caroline Rose, who studies the captagon trade at the New Lines Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., told me that Syria’s amphetamine business is worth some ten billion dollars. The country’s official gross domestic product is only nine billion.
Michael Kenney, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who researches the transnational drug trade, told me that although the term “narco-state” is often misused, it describes Syria perfectly. Assad’s regime has become dependent on captagon, much the way Bolivia’s government relied on the cocaine trade in the early eighties, and the Taliban stayed afloat on opium revenue during the years that it was fighting U.S. forces for control of Afghanistan. Kenney said of the Assad regime, “State institutions have been thoroughly penetrated and corrupted by drug activities. Significant elements of the Army, of the security apparatus, are directly involved in various aspects of the trade. And the government itself—to the extent that there is one—has become heavily reliant on the revenues from captagon exports in order to maintain its governance.”
Jordan, which abuts much of Syria’s southern border, is now an important overland route to Saudi Arabia, where the vast majority of captagon pills are consumed. And Jordan itself has become an increasingly fertile market for the amphetamine. Signs of drug wealth are now obvious in Ar-Ramtha, where run-down houses stand next to gaudy new mansions with gold-painted walls. (A British diplomat in Jordan described such buildings to me as examples of the local “narchitecture.”) The Jordanian government is determined to impede the movement of drugs through its territory. Much of its military is stationed on the border with Syria, despite the wider conflict that has shaken the region since last October. Clashes with armed traffickers are frequent.
The Jordanian military sometimes goes after captagon kingpins inside Syria. For some time, Marai al-Ramthan was at the top of the hit list. Aware that he was a target, he owned at least one bulletproof car and, according to a Syrian military defector, shuttled among three houses. One was a seven-acre complex near Damascus, protected by multiple security guards, which contained a basement warehouse. His family residence, near the Jordanian border, was decorated with a large photograph of Bashar al-Assad. The logo of Syria’s military-intelligence agency hung by the front door.
On May 8, 2023, shortly before dawn, Jordanian fighter jets bombed Ramthan’s family house. The attack flattened the building and killed Ramthan, his wife, and five of their six children. The Jordanian Air Force did not express any regret about the collateral damage. Shortly after the air strike, several figures connected to the captagon trade in southern Syria received texts from an unknown number: “We know who you are, your movements are monitored, your meetings are hacked. You contribute to destroying the minds of our people, and for their sake we will not have mercy on any of you. The Jordanians will soar like eagles to hunt you down, one criminal after another. Marai al-Ramthan was the first but not the last.”
In 1961, Karl Heinz-Klinger, a researcher at the West German pharmaceutical company Degussa, completed the synthesis of a new drug called fenethylline—a combination of amphetamine and an asthma medication called theophylline. One of fenethylline’s advertised benefits was that it produced the same kick as a standard amphetamine but didn’t cause a dangerous surge in blood pressure. Degussa launched the drug onto the worldwide market with the trademarked name Captagon. Each pill contained fifty milligrams of fenethylline, and had a pair of interlocking half-moons imprinted on one side. Doctors prescribed Captagon to treat narcolepsy and listlessness, and to help people recover from serious illnesses and injuries. From the beginning, however, the drug reached a nonmedical market. One famous user was Uschi Obermaier, a model who lived on various communes in West Germany and became an emblem of left-wing radicalism in the late sixties. In an autobiography, Obermaier revealed that as a young woman she became so addicted to Captagon that she took marijuana and LSD simply to counteract its effects.
Sales of Captagon were strong, but after eighteen years the patent expired, and other pharmaceutical companies began marketing fenethylline products. In the late seventies, Reda Yastas, an Egyptian who owned a pharmaceutical company in Germany called Samychemie, travelled to various Arab countries, including Lebanon, where he noticed that a surprising number of people were taking Captagon. Yastas later told a German court that there was “great demand for fenethylline there, perhaps because constant heat makes you so tired, or because the Quran forbids alcohol.”
Yastas produced pills that were chemically and visually identical to Captagon, and shipped half a million of them to Lebanon. In 1978, Degussa sued, but was forced to concede in court that it hadn’t protected the half-moon logo. It settled with Yastas, for about ten thousand dollars, but Yastas continued producing fenethylline pills, now using a similar snake-like “S” as the logo. In another injunction hearing, in 1982, Degussa claimed that Yastas was sowing “confusion” among customers. A judge disagreed. In any case, it seems likely that the real issue was profit: the Arab market for fenethylline had grown so huge that Degussa was selling only four per cent of its Captagon stock in Germany.
Degussa is now known as Evonik. A spokesperson for the company told me that, in the early eighties, Degussa suggested to the World Health Organization that fenethylline should be tightly controlled, “since growing numbers of counterfeit Captagon or the active ingredient fenethylline were being produced by unauthorized manufacturers.” The Evonik spokesperson said that this was the first time a pharmaceutical business had asked for its own drug to be regulated by the W.H.O. In 1986, the W.H.O. and the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs designated fenethylline as a stimulant so prone to being abused that it could be prescribed only in a small number of cases. Exports of the drug were also severely limited.
Other suppliers, however, were ready to meet the demand in the Middle East. Traffickers began secretly exporting Captagon pills from West Germany to Communist Bulgaria, and then on to the Middle East and West Africa, under the protection of Bulgaria’s state security apparatus, known as the D.S. Then a Lebanese trafficker named Abdul Hamid Shamaa gave the D.S. pill-pressing equipment, and three sites in Bulgaria began making counterfeit tablets, also called captagon. (Shamaa was granted Bulgarian citizenship for his services.)
In 1986, Degussa’s lawyers concluded—correctly—that the W.H.O.’s classification of fenethylline meant “the virtual elimination of legal sales,” and halted production. Fenethylline was banned in most countries. Nevertheless, Bulgarians continued producing and exporting pills. According to Hristo Hristov, a Bulgarian investigative journalist who has researched recently opened state files on drug trafficking, the revenues provided the government, which was starved of funds, with an important source of foreign currency. Although the Middle East remained the primary captagon market, the drug also found its way to Bulgaria’s neighbors in the Eastern Bloc. Misha Glenny, the author of the 2008 best-seller “McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld,” told me that he encountered captagon in Prague before the fall of the Berlin Wall—a time when other illicit drugs were hard to find.
Captagon never became a coveted drug in Western Europe, except in one context: sports. The illegal stimulant was used to make players more aggressive and relentless. In 2015, the French investigative journalist Pierre Ballester, in a book about rugby, quoted a French doctor as saying that members of the French rugby team took captagon pills before a notorious 1986 match against the All Blacks, New Zealand’s national team. The game is considered to be one of the most violent in rugby history. France won, 16–3, and the All Blacks team captain suffered a concussion, the loss of several teeth, and a torn scrotum.
In the decade and a half after the fall of Communism, Bulgarian authorities essentially ignored the continued illicit production of captagon—as long as it was for export only. The country finally cracked down on the drug’s manufacture in the mid-two-thousands, when it successfully made a bid to become a member of the European Union.
Captagon production soon shifted to the Middle East. Caroline Rose, at the New Lines Institute, has noted that, for years, the Syrian government was invited to send “chemists to study in Bulgaria.” This connection, she says, “paved the way for an exchange of technical and scientific expertise and the establishment of clandestine labs in Syria and along the Lebanese-Syrian border.” The militant group Hezbollah, which had plenty of experience trafficking hashish, ran many of the Lebanese labs. Meanwhile, vast quantities of a precursor chemical for amphetamines, benzyl methyl ketone, or BMK, were exported from various Western countries to the Middle East. BMK is sometimes used in household cleaning products, and, whenever shipments of BMK were intercepted, traffickers would claim to be transporting the chemical for legitimate purposes. But in 2009 ninety-five per cent of all BMK being produced was going to the Middle East. Either the region had become addicted to sparklingly clean kitchens or a more nefarious pattern had been established.
The labs of the Middle East have never been as fastidious as the Bulgarian ones were about copying captagon. Indeed, almost no pills sold as captagon today contain fenethylline. Instead, Rose told me, they comprise “a mishmash of precursor chemicals and additives.” She added, “The producers are kind of making it up as they go.” In the Arab world, “captagon” has come to mean any pill that has amphetamine inside, or that provides an amphetamine-type boost. Often, the only link to Degussa’s original product is the interlocking-half-moon design.
Part of captagon’s allure is that it can be used invisibly in societies that mete out harsh punishments for intoxication. There are no documented instances of fatal overdoses. Many Saudis use the drug regularly, and some fall prey to addiction, but the streets of Riyadh are not strewn with captagon junkies. It’s as if an entire region had developed a secret penchant for Adderall. Malik al-Abdeh, a British Syrian who has written extensively about captagon, told me, “In Middle Eastern societies, captagon is not viewed by a lot of people as a drug. They see it as almost a step up from headache pills. It’s more like a coffee than like a drug that you’re sniffing or injecting into your veins.” Of course, if many pills are ingested, the kick is stronger. Captagon is sometimes called “poor man’s cocaine.”
In 2011, after the Arab Spring uprisings, Lebanese authorities, eager to weaken Hezbollah, began shutting down the organization’s captagon factories. The group simply moved its production facilities across the Syrian border. This was when the Assad regime became involved in the captagon trade in earnest.
Captagon manufactured in Syria can follow various routes to reach the wealthy markets of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Pills can be shipped overland through Jordan; sent north to Turkey, then taken by boat to their destination; or delivered to one of Syria’s ports, such as Latakia, and shipped to ports in the Red Sea. The relative popularity of each route has depended on the fluctuations of geopolitics. A paper in the Columbia Journal of International Affairs notes that when ISIS took control of northern Syria, in the mid-twenty-tens, captagon smuggling into Turkey slowed dramatically. In 2015 and 2016, battles between rebels and Assad’s forces in the Syrian city of Homs led to the destruction of captagon facilities there; some production briefly returned to Lebanon.
As the trade keeps adapting, traffickers have sometimes turned to unorthodox methods. In 2015, the Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdulaziz was arrested, along with four other Saudis, at Beirut’s airport after attempting to load forty suitcases filled with captagon, and a little cocaine, onto a private plane bound for Riyadh. It was the largest seizure of drugs ever made at the airport. Abdulaziz was sentenced to five years in prison—a severe punishment for a prince.
Captagon has developed a reputation as a soldier’s drug. This has some basis in fact. Since the production of synthetic amphetamine and methamphetamine became widespread, in the first half of the twentieth century, such drugs have been attractive to sleep-deprived fighters. In the Second World War, the first conflict in which uppers became widespread, the German military used Pervitin, a methamphetamine, to energize its troops. Royal Air Force airmen on nighttime missions sometimes turned to Benzedrine—an amphetamine that was originally formulated as an asthma medication—which they called Wakey Wakey pills.
Captagon has been used in battle in the Arab world. Saddam Hussein’s Army was a top client of the Bulgarian mobsters who produced the drug. Fighters on all sides of the conflict in Syria have taken captagon. On June 12, 2018, coalition forces battling ISIS found and destroyed three hundred thousand captagon pills belonging to the Islamist group. Last year, the Israel Defense Forces reported finding captagon pills on the bodies of Hamas fighters killed during the October 7th attacks.
These discoveries notwithstanding, European tabloids have exaggerated the threat of what they call “jihadi speed.” After the ISIS attacks in Paris in 2015, such outlets reported that using captagon had made the perpetrators fearless and aggressive enough to commit suicidal violence. There was never any evidence to support this claim; autopsies of the bodies of the terrorists showed that they had not ingested alcohol or narcotics. Nor can jihadism account for the volume of captagon being produced, or for the enormous profits it generates. There are only so many jihadis. The major user base for captagon is broadly the same as the one Reda Yastas found in the late seventies: workers and students looking for a strong pick-me-up that won’t derail their day.
Half a century ago, amphetamines became popular among truckers in the United States. On a recent trip to Jordan, I was told that truck drivers who stop at roadside coffee venders often order a qahwa mazbouta: a “blended coffee,” which costs about ten dollars. A captagon pill gets crushed and mixed into the drink. On the streets of Syria, meanwhile, one can ask for a ya mas-hrny—a “keep me awake” pill.
Saudi Arabia, in particular, appears to be flooded with captagon, given the scale of the seizures that authorities there are making. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime has stated that between 2012 and 2021 sixty-seven per cent of the captagon officially seized by authorities was either inside or bound for the kingdom. A working assumption by anti-narcotics experts is that police forces generally catch about twenty per cent of trafficked drugs. Saudi Arabia claims that between May, 2023, and July, 2024, it seized seventy-six million captagon pills. The country has a population of only thirty-two million.
This past spring, I visited Riyadh. The Saudi government was uneasy about allowing officials to talk to a reporter about drugs, but a man who dealt directly with the captagon problem was authorized to speak with me, on the condition that I did not name him or the ministry where he worked. The official said that sixty-five per cent of people in jail in Saudi Arabia were there for drug-related offenses. The domestic market for captagon, he confirmed, was mostly students, and also included workers in the “shadow” economy—presumably, the temporary migrants being enlisted to construct the country’s many new buildings, often at alarmingly high speeds. (The new Kingdom Arena, the highest-capacity soccer arena in the world, was reportedly built in two months.) Academic researchers interviewing Saudi captagon users have found that some women use the drug to aid weight loss.
The official told me that the glut of captagon in Saudi Arabia could not be explained solely as a matter of supply and demand. Rather, there had to be a political motivation behind such high volumes of trafficking to the kingdom. They were being targeted, he said. (This view seemed at odds with that of most Western observers, who see captagon primarily as a source of income for the Assad regime; Michael Kenney, the narcotics expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said that it’s “more about business.”) The political purpose of captagon, the Saudi official said, a bit melodramatically, was to tear at the social fabric of his country, and thereby slow down its progress. To counter this destructive effect, he said, authorities in the kingdom treat addicts with kindness: anyone who admits to a drug dependency can be treated for free at a government clinic, without fear of punishment. Traffickers, however, are put to death.
In October, the Ministry of the Interior announced that twenty-one Saudis had been arrested on suspicion of belonging to a gang that trafficked captagon into the Riyadh region. Sixteen of the suspects were employed at government ministries. Their crimes included transporting drugs “from outside the kingdom” and secretly selling off drugs seized by Saudi authorities. Saudi Arabia is no exception to the rule that drug trafficking cannot thrive without corruption.
The Arab world’s relationship with captagon shows up in unlikely places. Harley Street, in London, is where the most expensive private doctors in the United Kingdom have their offices. In an elegant town house on the street, Bashar al-Assad’s father-in-law, Fawaz Akhras, has a cardiology practice. A few doors down, Sophia Khalique, a general practitioner, runs a clinic with Rameez Ali, a therapist and addiction specialist. Among its clients are Saudi captagon addicts.
Khalique and Ali make an odd pair. On the day I visited, Khalique padded around her giant office in a minidress, fish-net tights, and fluffy slippers. Ali was friendly but intense; his forehead bore the mark of frequent prayer. Khalique and Ali have treated hundreds of rich students from the Middle East who have developed captagon habits. Their patients are mostly men aged nineteen to twenty-four. Many of them come to the clinic complaining of severe insomnia. It always takes a few questions to identify the root of this problem: a dependence on stimulants.
“When I speak to the students, they say it’s becoming more and more embedded in their life style in the Middle East,” Ali said, of the drug. Khalique said that some patients, already dependent on amphetamines, come to her hoping for a legal prescription—for, say, attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder medication. “They’re saying they want a study aid,” she told me, raising an eyebrow. Some of these patients, she noted, might indeed have learning difficulties. But the attraction of captagon is often social. In her view, it is often used as a “party drug.”
Ali told me that young Middle Eastern men had frequently spoken to him of taking captagon at private house parties. At high doses, users experience euphoria, but the drug seems low risk and not as overtly haram as alcohol. Habitual users of captagon often develop symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety, depression, and mood swings. Ali was also beginning to hear stories about Syrian captagon being used in tandem with anabolic steroids, to cater to a crossover market of men who want not only to keep awake but also to suppress their appetites and bulk up their bodies. Ali said, “Steroid abuse in the Middle East is huge.”
A disused captagon-pill press stands in the parking lot outside Jordan’s anti-narcotics directorate, in Amman. The device, made of metal, is about the size of a refrigerator, with large buttons in primary colors, like a child’s toy. Jordanian authorities seized the press during a recent raid on a production facility, and placed it outside the directorate as a symbol of the agency’s purpose.
On a cool February morning, the head of the directorate, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan al-Qudah, sat behind a wooden desk, drinking coffee and sucking on a vape, while others in the office smoked cigarettes. (Nicotine is Jordan’s most popular drug.) He said that I’d caught him during the busiest season for trafficking from Syria, and explained that smugglers prefer to cross the desert in winter, when they can use the cover of sandstorms, snow, or fog.
During a snowstorm on January 26, 2022, Syrian traffickers attempted to ferry a huge consignment of captagon pills into Jordan on foot. Jordanian troops opened fire, killing twenty-seven smugglers and wounding several others. That was an unusually bloody clash, but serious engagements occur nearly every month. Syrian smugglers now use a variety of cunning techniques to move their drugs to Jordan, including drones and carrier pigeons, which have been taught to fly with tiny bags of contraband affixed to their legs. More than once in recent months, smugglers have fired consignments of captagon across the border inside surface-to-air missiles fitted with tracking devices that allow criminal colleagues in Jordan to find them after they land.
An international monitor had told me that a smaller amount of drugs had been captured at the border in 2023 than in 2022, suggesting a decrease in trafficking activity. But Qudah said that the volume of seized drugs was an imperfect metric. His ministry preferred to measure trafficking attempts, which, incidentally, were on the rise. “Three attempts weekly, minimum,” he said. “This hasn’t been the case before. It’s much more aggressive now.”
Moreover, the number of people engaged in such sorties had risen. Before Jordan instituted a shoot-on-sight order against traffickers, in 2022, most attempts to move drugs across the border involved only a handful of people. Now, Qudah said, groups of thirty or forty men were common. A few weeks before our meeting, two hundred and fifty men had crossed the border simultaneously, at different locations; another time, four hundred men had used this strategy. The modus operandi was for cars to transport the drugs to within a mile of the border, where individuals would carry them into Jordan in backpacks. Jordanian forces have infrared cameras that register body heat, but these sometimes fail to spot traffickers—say, during a sandstorm. (A source who knew some of the smugglers said that traffickers had invested in thermal-camouflage suits, to evade infrared detection.) The Jordanians also knew that behind the smugglers carrying backpacks would be a “defensive line” of militiamen with semi-automatic weapons, ready to kill members of border patrols. Often, Qudah said, engagements became “a shoot-out.”
Qudah estimated that four-fifths of the captagon entering Jordan was destined for Saudi Arabia. The rest would remain in Jordan. I asked to see some pills that he had seized. He buzzed his secretary. A minute later, an officer brought in a baggie containing two hundred tan-colored pills printed with interlocking half-moons. That logo, Qudah said, was becoming passé. One popular Syrian variety, he said, now featured a horse’s-head insignia; another, the Lexus logo.
Captagon pills were no longer his sole concern. The same people moving captagon from Syria were now also trafficking crystal meth, which could easily be made in the same factories as captagon, and was far more dangerous. A few years ago, crystal meth in Jordan cost a hundred and forty dollars a gram; now it was fifty-five. A friend in Amman told me that she’d seen crystal meth used at middle-class dinner parties.
I visited a state-sponsored rehabilitation clinic in Amman, where some fifty men were recovering from various addictions. One patient in his thirties, who wore a Hollister hoodie, chain-smoked cigarettes, and shook violently, told me he’d first become a captagon user in Jordan. He then moved to Turkey, where he ran a successful construction business. The captagon boost became insufficient, and he turned to crystal meth. The patient said that he had “lost everything” because of his addiction. In Istanbul, he’d become hooked on crystal meth—in addition to taking three or four captagon pills a day. He’d been arrested and deported to Jordan. The man said that most of the captagon dealers in Istanbul had been Syrian or Jordanian. But Iranian gangs, he said, controlled the crystal-meth trade, to the point that the drug was known locally as “Iranian heroin.”
Around 2015, police forces in Europe and the Middle East began seizing huge consignments of captagon. In November, 2015, Turkish authorities confiscated nearly eleven million tablets hidden inside a shipment of oil filters headed for the Gulf. A month later, Lebanese police found thirty million tablets bound for Egypt, stashed in a shipment of school desks.
Chris Urben worked for the D.E.A. for twenty-five years. Before retiring from the agency, in 2021, he was in the special-operations division, focussing on international threats. Captagon became an area of concern. Starting in 2018, Urben told me, “the U.S. government essentially had an intelligence-gathering effort to determine why we were seeing this massive increase in terms of large seizures of captagon at ports, and who was benefitting.”
By 2021, the picture had become clear. Many of the intercepted shipments were arriving from Syria—especially from the port of Latakia, which is a stronghold of the Assad family. In the most notable case, in July, 2020, eighty-four million captagon pills from Latakia were uncovered inside a shipment of industrial-sized gears and rolls of paper at the Italian port of Salerno. The seized drugs were worth a billion dollars. But, in the estimation of Europol, there is no domestic market for captagon in Europe. Some Middle Eastern traffickers whose shipments might seem suspicious to Saudi or Gulf authorities launder the provenance of the freight by moving it through Europe first. The extra cost is worthwhile if the shipment is successful.
“The Assad regime was organizing this on a massive scale,” Urben said. “There was a certain professionalism, in terms of organized crime.” Intelligence from within Syria confirmed that the Assad family, and in particular the President’s brother Maher, controlled the supply, in partnership with producers in Lebanon. The Hezbollah connection was significant, Urben explained, “because they’re experts in terms of transportation, facilitation, and corruption in those regions and outside those regions—corruption at ports, money laundering.”
Urben told me that the D.E.A. shared its intelligence on captagon with legislators, and that a few politicians had jumped on the issue. The concern wasn’t that captagon would soon flood America—the country was already in the grip of more powerful and addictive synthetic drugs, such as fentanyl. The politicians wanted to stop the billions of dollars flowing to Assad’s sanctioned regime, and also to his allies and enablers in Iran and Lebanon. At the vanguard of this effort was French Hill, a Republican congressman from Arkansas, who co-sponsored the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, which placed heavy sanctions on Assad and his closest allies. Hill subsequently introduced the Captagon Act of 2022, which was designed to “disrupt and dismantle the Assad regime’s production and trafficking of the lethal narcotic,” and, more recently, the Illicit Captagon Trafficking Suppression Act––which President Joe Biden signed into law as part of April’s foreign-aid package—to widen the ambit of sanctions against those involved with the trade. Hill, whose efforts have attracted bipartisan support, told me that his bill had two objectives: “Can you disrupt transnational drug networks, with partners? That’s a good goal. But my principal goal is cutting off the funding to Assad.”
The Treasury Department recently sanctioned fourteen more Syrian and Lebanese nationals involved in the captagon trade. One of these individuals is Taher al-Kayali, a Syrian who owns Neptunus L.L.C., a shipping company based in Latakia. The cargo ship Noka, which was intercepted by Greek authorities in 2018 and found to be carrying more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of captagon and hashish, was a Neptunus ship.
Whether sanctions will help to curtail the captagon trade is an open question. A recent U.N. report noted that sanctions against Iraq prior to the 2003 U.S.-led war had “contracted the Iraqi economy” but “fuelled underground economies.” Similarly, sanctions against Iran and Syria could amplify “opportunities for trafficking and illegal economies in overcoming sanction restrictions.” When the world won’t otherwise do business with you, selling drugs can make up the shortfall.
Since the Caesar Act was passed, captagon trafficking has, in fact, increased dramatically. Matthew Zweig helped to implement that legislation as a senior sanctions adviser in the Trump Administration. He is now at the lobbying arm of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank. “For many of the Syrian actors, and for actors in the Iran threat network, captagon is a major sanctions-evasion tool,” he said. But, in his reckoning, this was a reason to work even harder to stifle the trade, rather than a reason to weaken sanctions.
On my trip to Jordan, I was told that the U.S. had provided authorities there with scanners and other equipment for interdicting trafficked substances. A D.E.A. officer based in Cyprus recently spent six months in Jordan offering assistance to the government there. But the D.E.A., which has many higher priorities than captagon, officially has no permanent staff in the country. The Jordanians are clearly overwhelmed. A Syrian opposition figure who monitors the captagon trade told me that Jordan’s soldiers are “doing what they can . . . but they are not equipped enough.”
There is also a question of whether the U.S.’s policy aligns with those of countries in the Middle East. In May, 2023, Syria was welcomed back to the Arab League for the first time since 2011, at a summit in Jeddah. Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman, was photographed chatting warmly with Assad. For the moment, Russia and Iran remain Assad’s most crucial allies, but other countries have recently chosen to take a less punitive approach to his government, despite the sanctions risks.
In Jordan, too, politicians are changing their confrontational stance. I met with the interior minister, Mazin al-Farrayeh, who told me that he’d seen his Syrian counterpart the previous week, at a gathering that also included the Iraqi and Lebanese ministers. “The outcome of that meeting was that Syria was the center of the drug problem,” Farrayeh said. But Jordan’s response was not to threaten the Syrians. Instead, Farrayeh told me, Syria needed financial help to pay for scanning equipment and additional customs officers, so that it could curtail smuggling on its side of the border.
The situation seemed absurd: the Jordanian government knew that the Assad regime was directing much of the captagon trade, and yet it was pretending that Syria was committed to stopping that trade. (Farrayeh told me that, if Jordan were to give the Syrian government scanning equipment, at least it would remove one of Assad’s possible excuses for failing to stop the smuggling.) The minister’s approach was mirrored across other agencies. Every Jordanian official I met seemed loath to criticize the Assad regime’s involvement in captagon production and smuggling. Indeed, Qudah, the head of the anti-narcotics directorate, refused to speak to me on the record about it. (Even the Saudi official who talked to me about captagon being used as a weapon declined to name Assad or Syria explicitly.)
Representatives from several Jordanian agencies explained their positions by pointing to the chaotic situation in southern Syria, where, despite over-all control by the Assad regime, an array of groups hold influence. Katrina Sammour, a Jordanian security analyst, told me that the cautious rapprochement between Jordan and Assad’s government reflected her country’s weariness, given Assad’s seeming impregnability. Sammour said, “Jordan was the first to call for Syria to be removed from the community of states as punishment for Assad’s crimes”—such as chemical attacks on his own people. “But, ultimately, the world community failed.” When it came to captagon, “instead of allowing chaos at our border, the decision was made to make a partnership—albeit an imperfect one.”
A Syrian-opposition monitoring group called ETANA has done bold investigations into the captagon trade, gathering information from hundreds of sources within Syrian gangs, businesses, and government ministries. ETANA staffers scoff at any suggestion that the Assad regime is not in control of Syria’s drug empire. Before the Jordanian air strike killed Marai al-Ramthan and his family, for instance, ETANA sources observed him meeting with several members of Syrian military intelligence. In two interviews, ETANA representatives explained to me what they believed to be the structure of the captagon business in Syria. Profits, they said, flowed upward to senior figures in the 4th Division. About half the money made from the Syrian captagon trade was pocketed by the Assad regime.
Last year, a joint investigation by the BBC and a journalistic collective called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project uncovered important new details from the 2021 trial, in Beirut, of Hassan Daqqou, a Lebanese Syrian man who has been called “the King of Captagon” in the Lebanese press. Daqqou had been accused of masterminding a shipment of nearly a hundred million captagon pills, which was seized in Malaysia. During the trial, a series of WhatsApp messages between Daqqou and a man he named only as the Boss was presented as evidence. In the messages, the two men discuss the movement of “goods” and security clearances. The Boss is suspected to be Ghassan Bilal—Maher al-Assad’s deputy in the 4th Division.
In London, I talked with a Syrian defector who had met Bilal when they were both in the Syrian Army. He told me that Bilal, a former engineer who had served for a long time under Maher al-Assad, “was giving orders” about captagon trafficking himself. The defector said that both Bilal and Maher had the power to increase or decrease the flow of captagon out of Syria. If they wanted to stop the captagon trade tomorrow, the defector said, it would just take “a phone call.”
Samir Rifai, who served as the Prime Minister of Jordan between 2009 and 2011, told me that this view was simplistic. We met at his house, in the hills outside Amman. From his garden, you could gaze across the border to Israel and the West Bank. Jericho was just visible. Syria, to the north, was out of sight. Rifai, who speaks in English that he polished while studying at Harvard and Cambridge, sees his region in pragmatic terms. As Prime Minister, he sat across the table from Assad when the Arab Spring was exploding. Ever since, he has followed the catastrophe in Syria with increasing dismay. I asked him whether he thought Assad could stop the drug trade if he wanted to.
“Yes,” Rifai said. “But with a caveat. He and the Iranians have to be convinced. The problem that he has is he does not trust the West. So for him to leave the graces of Russia and Iran? What guarantees are going to be given to him that will make him take that leap of faith?”
ETANA believes that, for a few weeks before the May, 2023, meeting of the Arab League, the Assads ordered traffickers to slow captagon production. (Jordan clearly thought the Syrians had not been trying hard enough: Marai al‑Ramthan and his family were killed shortly before the summit.) But the ETANA representatives showed me evidence that the situation had since changed. This past February, a source described to ETANA a conversation in which a senior figure in Assad’s government ordered a captagon kingpin to resume “full production.”
Matthew Zweig, the sanctions expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, was less certain about such a clean narrative. Over time, he pointed out, drug empires develop rival centers of power, and the criminals involved in the captagon trade were no doubt determined to keep their businesses going. Zweig didn’t doubt that Syria’s 4th Division was heavily involved in the captagon business. But the amphetamine and methamphetamine markets in the Middle East had possibly grown beyond Assad’s control. Zweig noted that the Arab League’s decision to resume relations with Assad was made partly in the hope that he could stop captagon from saturating the region. But the captagon trade was still strong, and possibly growing. Zweig asked, “Is that because Assad won’t stop it—or because he can’t?” ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment