Early last December, opposition fighters led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered the Syrian capital of Damascus, capping a lightning offensive that had captured significant territory in just over one week. A day later, Syrian dictator and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow by plane. Assad’s ouster unraveled an illicit industry embedded within his regime: the Captagon trade.
Since the late 2010s, Assad’s regime had been involved in the production and trafficking of Captagon, an amphetamine-type stimulant. The drug trade provided Damascus with a crucial financial lifeline during the Syrian civil war, undermining the effects of international sanctions. The regime orchestrated the trade through its security agencies and branches, including the Fourth Armored Division and Air Force Intelligence Directorate, as well as via Assad family members and elite business associates.
Early last December, opposition fighters led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered the Syrian capital of Damascus, capping a lightning offensive that had captured significant territory in just over one week. A day later, Syrian dictator and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow by plane. Assad’s ouster unraveled an illicit industry embedded within his regime: the Captagon trade.
Since the late 2010s, Assad’s regime had been involved in the production and trafficking of Captagon, an amphetamine-type stimulant. The drug trade provided Damascus with a crucial financial lifeline during the Syrian civil war, undermining the effects of international sanctions. The regime orchestrated the trade through its security agencies and branches, including the Fourth Armored Division and Air Force Intelligence Directorate, as well as via Assad family members and elite business associates.
With backing from the commercial, security, and political sectors, the Captagon trade flourished. Regime cronies in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and industry helped manufacture, package, and conceal pills with licit goods, while security agencies facilitated transport and immunity from law enforcement. Meanwhile, ministerial officials maintained a strict counternarcotics narrative, denying the presence of Captagon production in regime-held territories.
By the early 2020s, the Captagon trade had become a $10 billion industry, and the regime used the drug as a political bargaining tool. By flooding conservative markets in the Gulf with Captagon and provoking clashes along Syria’s borders with Jordan, the Assad regime sought to pressure its regional neighbors into normalization talks and sanctions relief.
This tactic was most evident in the spring and summer of 2023, when Captagon became a key agenda item in normalization negotiations between the Assad regime and Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other regional counterparts. The regime leveraged the threat of flooding its neighbors’ borders with illicit drugs and engaging in kinetic smuggling incidents with border guards to resist demands related to human rights abuses, Syria’s relationship with Iran, and regional relations more broadly.
Though Syria gained reentry into the Arab League, this strategy failed, and Syria’s neighbors largely refrained from intervening on the Assad regime’s behalf as opposition forces dismantled the regime.
Opposition forces and local communities are now beginning to uncover evidence of the regime’s extensive involvement in the Captagon trade. They have searched palaces, villas, prisons, detention facilities, military bases, and even luxury car garages tied to Assad and his cronies, finding enormous caches of Captagon pills and manufacturing equipment.
At the Mezzeh air base—a facility often used by the Assad family, the Republican Guard, and the Air Force Intelligence Directorate—HTS forces discovered and destroyed millions of Captagon pills. In Latakia, residents raided a car-trading company—owned and operated by Munther al-Assad, a prominent member of the Assad family—and found thousands of pills that were soon strewn across streets and sewers. And in Douma, local residents and HTS forces identified one of the largest Captagon production sites: a former potato chip factory affiliated with Assad’s brother, Maher, and the regime-allied businessman Amer Khiti.
On Dec. 8, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani delivered a victory speech at the historic Umayyad Mosque, outlining his objectives for governance in Syria. He stated that Syria had become a Captagon “factory” under Assad and would be “purified.” His comments are indicative of HTS’s stance on counternarcotics policy. Before the group expanded its control beyond Idlib, it was already focused on curbing regime-linked drug trafficking, particularly along routes to Turkey and northeast Syria, a popular corridor for trade into Iraq. HTS Captagon seizures in the early 2020s often directly implicated Damascus.
As HTS seeks to attract international support and investment, it may adopt a strategy of expose-and-dispose toward the Captagon trade in the immediate term. This includes revealing and dismantling the Assad regime’s industrial-scale manufacturing centers. However, such a strategy could take months, require immense resources, and risk the political goodwill with local communities that the new government needs.
HTS will also need to demonstrate its long-term commitment to combating Captagon networks. The group might not fully eradicate smaller-scale Captagon laboratories or prevent former regime officials who may receive amnesty from continuing their operations during or after a transitional process.
Syria’s path forward may lie in revitalizing its pharmaceutical sector. Before the war, the country was a regional leader in generic drug production. Reconstruction efforts should focus on restoring Captagon laboratories and storage sites to create jobs for displaced skilled workers and help Syria regain its position as a regional drug supplier. Redirecting the workforce and expertise previously tied to Captagon production toward legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturing must be a central counternarcotics objective for the United States and its partners in Syria.
Such a strategy, however, would partially rely upon sectoral sanctions relief, particularly with respect to sanctions imposed on Syria’s pharmaceutical industry that have prevented acquisition of raw materials for licit drug production. The United States and its partners can play a role in encouraging and potentially providing material support to rebuild Syria’s pharmaceutical infrastructure, production lines, and export economy.
HTS lacks the interest and capacity to address the inevitable balloon effect of the Captagon drug trade—the likely spillover of drug production and trafficking into countries including Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait, and Lebanon. The group is concentrated on managing Syria’s transitional political process, maintaining control over border checkpoints, and getting support from local communities. HTS will likely have the means to target large players in the illicit drugs industry if its leaders choose to, but smaller actors will be able to exploit new gaps in enforcement.
Major geopolitical events often prompt creative and entrepreneurial criminal networks to adapt, seeking alternative trafficking routes, production hubs, and markets. Criminal actors have already established Captagon production and trafficking sites in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait, and even Europe, positioning them close to consumption markets in the Gulf and beyond.
These actors are also likely to expand trade-based money laundering, which enables traffickers to conceal funds by leveraging legitimate businesses, to new production centers. Emerging Captagon hubs in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and the Gulf could exploit regional trade routes—for example, having agricultural export figures masking both Captagon and its revenue. Free trade zones in the United Arab Emirates or Turkey may further facilitate fund transfers. Without robust international coordination and stricter financial regulations, these networks could adapt and diversify.
Assad’s fall means that Syria is no longer a narcostate, but it does not spell the end of the Captagon trade. Instead, it complicates it. Without production hubs in Syria, Captagon criminal agents are no longer tied down and can now stretch their operations beyond Syria to destinations unknown.
The post What Will Happen to Assad’s Secret Drug Empire? appeared first on Foreign Policy.
