In the summer of 2020, the Italian police thwarted a huge drug deal that was on its way to European ports, after the security forces in the Italian port of "Salerno" were able to seize three ships coming from the Syrian port of Latakia with a quantity of the drug "Captagon" on board. Captagon - based on phenethylene - weighs 14 tons and is valued at around one billion euros, containing about 85 million microdiscs hidden inside a shipment of machine parts and industrial paper rolls.
Fingers were soon pointed at the Syrian regime and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, but a few months after the incident, the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, "Hassan Nasrallah", denied the accusations against his party, and criticized targeting the party with "false news and Western propaganda". His expression, and the party leader was not satisfied with that, but rather said explicitly in his televised speech: "Our position on drugs of all kinds is clear. It is religiously prohibited to manufacture, sell, buy, smuggle and consume them."
However, this was not enough to stop the suspicions. One year after Nasrallah denied his party's responsibility for the Italy deal, the list of accusations against the party and its Syrian allies expanded, as the Captagon seizures around the world at that time revealed the existence of a trade worth billions of dollars for this. The drug traveled the world from Syria, and it was the drug that was first produced in the West in the 1960s for treatment, before it was banned because of its addictive properties.
For years, parts of the Middle East, especially the Arab Gulf states, have been flooded with Captagon tablets, known as "the cocaine of the poor", and successive shipments of this drug have been seized in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Egypt coming from Lebanon and Syria, which have become the most prominent countries in manufacturing and exporting phenethylene in the area. This indicates that more than 250 million Captagon pills were seized globally in 2021, a number equivalent to 18 times the amount seized just four years ago.
Hezbollah and the Damascus Regime's Journey with Drugs
Although Nasrallah mentioned in his denial that his party was behind the aforementioned Italian drug deal, that "any involvement in the drug trade is prohibited by religious scholars, even if the plan It is to transfer it to the enemy.” The records of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that were declassified in 1994 confirmed (1) that the party’s activities in the field of drugs are rooted and extended, as it goes back to the permissibility of some religious scholars associated with the party for that trade at the time if drugs were sold To the enemies of Islam in the context of the war against them.
Since the 1990s, then, the party has been involved in the drug trade and legalizes it in theory, using its relations with groups well-established in this trade in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, which it has long considered as a major financial source for it. What is more, Hezbollah members also established relations with drug gangs in Latin America, which have old economic ties to Lebanese capital, where the two parties later formed elaborate drug smuggling and money laundering networks, which the party finally justified itself by financing operations and goals that are more important than harm. that caused by drugs.
The Lebanese party's interest in this trade increased after 2006. After the Israeli war inflicted heavy financial consequences on it, it turned to Tehran, which provided it with the necessary pharmaceutical equipment to manufacture a counterfeit copy of Captagon, the drug that was made to treat mental disorders in the first place. And with the expansion of the military and financial obligations of the party, which has been besieged economically in recent years by US sanctions and the economic collapse in Lebanon, the organization has increased its reliance on drug smuggling to finance its operations, which now include large areas of Syria. Meanwhile, (2) the Syrian regime was not exempt from involvement in that trade, as the Syrian army controlled Lebanon for years before withdrawing from it, and during that period, it enjoyed wide powers for a long time in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, which is the main source of cannabis cultivation.
In any case, the massive production of drugs moved into the Syrian territory after 2011, when the regime initially needed to reward its local fighters, whom it had brought in to fight, by giving them the drug Captagon. Then, after Hezbollah in the Syrian war, starting in 2012, the party not only annexed vast areas across the border in the Syrian Qalamoun Mountains to grow hashish and develop its industry, but rather moved some manufacturing facilities into Syria to escape Lebanese and international legal prosecution, with the support of course from the Syrian government.
For a long time, the geographical location of Syria, located at the crossroads between the Middle East, Europe and Asia, made the country a transit point for drugs coming from Europe, Turkey and Lebanon, on their way to Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf, but what Hezbollah has done is to transform Syria from a mere stopover to a major drug production site, where it provided Captagon producers in Syria with technical expertise and protection, which led to an increase in Syrian production of the most popular stimulant until it exceeded that of Lebanon itself (3).
With an international embargo, the Assad regime relied on drug trafficking as a lifeline that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually (billions of dollars in some estimates), and provides funding for weapons and fighters for the war that has been going on for more than a decade now. As the report of the Operational Analysis and Research Center, which focuses on the situation in Syria, states: “Syria has become a drug state for two main types of concern: hashish and Captagon.” The report added, "In 2020, the value of Syria's market exports of Captagon reached no less than $3.46 billion. Although smuggling of Captagon was previously a source of funding for anti-state armed groups, the recovery of those areas enabled the Assad regime and its allies to strengthen their role." as beneficiaries.
The same numbers are confirmed in the report issued by the Center for Operations Analysis and Research (COAR), a consulting company based in Cyprus, where it indicates that the Syrian regime exported drugs worth no less than $3.4 billion in 2020. The grains coming from the Syrian regime’s territory cost about $25 per pill in the Gulf countries, more than 50 times its cost in the country of origin, which makes the drug a significant source of hard currency for the regime.
Saudi Arabia: The Captagon Market
Captagon (or two crescents, as some Saudi youth call it, in reference to the two letters C engraved on its tablets that resemble two crescents) is the preferred drug in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states in general. In recent years, (4) GCC countries have turned into the first destination for the drug market of Lebanese and Syrian origin, especially Captagon coming through land routes from Jordan and Lebanon, which prompted the Saudi authorities to engage in a major struggle to curb that wave and boom caused by the Syrian war and its aftermath. from events.
However, the last straw that broke the camel's back, and as a result of which Riyadh decided to ban the import of fruits and vegetables from Lebanon, came last April when more than 5 million pills of Captagon were found inside pomegranates. The Saudi Ministry of Interior has said that "the ban is necessary, because Lebanon has failed to stop drug trafficking, despite the kingdom's numerous attempts to urge the relevant Lebanese authorities to do so, and to protect the kingdom's citizens and residents."
In this context, officials in the Kingdom believe that targeting the country with drugs coming from Lebanon and Syria has two goals at the same time, political and financial. With the need of the influential authorities in both countries for money, it is unlikely that the smuggling operations took place without the protection of powerful forces in Beirut and Damascus, but what observers agree on is that the Kingdom’s efforts to confront this worsening trade, including the comprehensive ban decision, cannot fully achieve its goals. The evidence is that the deals continued after the ban on exporting fruits and vegetables, which caused great harm to farmers in Lebanon, as smugglers quickly adapted to the ban, either by adopting new methods to camouflage Captagon tablets, or by using completely new smuggling methods.
The war against "Abu Hilalin"
"If you order 100 million pills, within five days they will be packed, it doesn't take much time," this is what a Lebanese drug dealer living in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley told "The National", boasting of the ease and speed of producing Captagon, which has become one of Lebanon's most profitable exports in the midst of the country's economic collapse. Attention is constantly directed towards the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, the stronghold of cannabis cultivation in Lebanon, which has been transformed into the production and manufacture of Captagon, and has become a bridge, not only to Hezbollah's influence across the Syrian-Lebanese border, but also to the drug trade in which Syrian producers entered into partnerships with Lebanese smugglers.
This boom was reinforced by what Syria previously possessed of experts in the field of medicine, who gave their input in the production of Captagon, in addition to that the country’s factories that were devoted to manufacturing the drug, as well as the easy access to shipping routes across the Mediterranean Sea to Turkey and Europe on the one hand, and to Gulf on one side. It was therefore impossible for the two countries, caught in a severe economic crisis and a war-ravaged region, to resist engaging in that trade facilitated by all geographical and technical factors, and reinforced by the rich markets in the south and north.
As we mentioned earlier, production and manufacturing soon moved from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon to Syria itself, and (5) Lebanese drug lords also moved to Syria to escape the persecution of the Lebanese authorities, who responded timidly to international pressure calling for legal measures to curb the flow of drugs. For example, Noah Zuaiter, known as the "Lebanese Drug Lord", moved to live mainly in Syria, after he was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor by a Lebanese military court.
Zuaiter's experience provides a microcosm of the influence of drug men in Lebanon and Syria, as this trade enjoys the support of influential officials in both countries. In Lebanon, where the salaries of the army, police and customs have been reduced by more than 90%, the security forces are the group most vulnerable to temptation with bribes. In order to pass the drug trade, which means that corruption - and behind it the economic crisis and the weakness of the state - stands as a strong obstacle to combating the production and trade of drugs between Lebanon and Syria, and that the solution to the crisis is inseparable from the solution to the social, political and economic crises that afflicted the Levant region. Captagon is only one of its chapters.
Moreover, behind the growth of the drug industry and trade in Syria are the influential people and relatives of the head of the Syrian regime, Bashar al-Assad, and they will remain as long as al-Assad remains. The production and distribution operations, which generate billions, now exceed the legal exports of the country, and are supervised by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army. The regime, according to what an investigation conducted by the "New York Times" newspaper shows, and it is known that this division is led by "Maher al-Assad", the brother of the Syrian president and one of the most powerful statesmen in Syria today.
There are many obstacles to combating Captagon, as its industry and trade enjoy support from different levels of officials, ranging from presidents to security officers, whose interest all lies in flooding the market with their goods. As for the parties wishing to curb this wheel, to protect its youth on the one hand, and to disrupt the economic wheel of Assad and his allies in Syria and Lebanon on the other hand, they are the Gulf states in the first place, then Turkey and the Western powers. They fear that this Captagon wave will end with the consolidation of the economic role of drugs in Syria and Lebanon - similar to what happened in Afghanistan previously - and that the countries will shift over time towards exporting more dangerous types of drugs than Captagon. The Syrian network that was established to smuggle Captagon began to transport more dangerous drugs recently, such as crystal meth.
While the Captagon trade is adapting to new restrictions and obstacles, and is gaining effectiveness and a sustainable economic impact in the midst of the economic crisis that has been ravaging the Levant for a decade, efforts to combat it are not likely to succeed soon, as it is linked to settling the Syrian conflict itself, and resolving the political crisis. As for the Western powers and international institutions, they have little to do except tighten control and punish the companies involved in the Captagon trade, until a comprehensive settlement looms that uproots this trade before it becomes intractable, and before Syria becomes another Afghanistan.
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Sources
- Hezbollah operatives seen behind spike in drug dealing, analysts say
- Syria has become a narco-state
- Insight – War turns Syria into major amphetamines producer, consumer
- Cutting Off Lebanon Won't Stem the Captagon Trade
- On Syria's Ruins, a Drug Empire Flourishes