Syria’s New Authorities Vow to Shutter Captagon Trade

Narcotraffickers who attempted to flood Jordan with over 27 million illicit captagon pills in 2024 may now be out of business. “When it comes to captagon and drug smuggling, we promise it is over and won’t return,” interim Syrian Foreign Minister Assad Hassan al-Shibani stated at a joint press conference with his Jordanian counterpart in Amman on January 6.

Choked by Western sanctions, former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime turned to the production and trafficking of captagon — an amphetamine-like stimulant colloquially described as the “poor man’s cocaine” — to raise revenue. The captagon trade eventually grew into a multi-billion dollar, regime-led enterprise that posed an ongoing border security challenge for Jordan, which served as a key overland smuggling route from Syria to Gulf markets.

An Inside Look at the Assad Regime’s Captagon Empire

Evidence emerged after Assad’s fall corroborating Western assessments of his regime’s involvement in industrial-scale captagon production.

On December 10, video emerged of a blaze destroying millions of captagon pills that Syrian rebels found inside the former Syrian Air Force’s Mezzeh Air Base. The next day, footage of a captagon factory allegedly linked to Bashar al-Assad’s brother and head of the former Syrian Army’s Fourth Division, Maher al-Assad, circulated on social media. A Syrian businessman told Reuters that one of Assad’s associates, Amer Khiti, seized the factory from his family in 2018 and “flipped it from the production of food to the production of captagon that killed Syria’s children in support of the Fourth Division.” Another video surfaced appearing to show captagon pills and production infrastructure in a warehouse at the Fourth Division headquarters. The Turkish Anadolu Agency also released footage reportedly showing a captagon factory inside Maher al-Assad’s villa in the Dimas area, west of Damascus.

Jordan’s Escalating Battle Against Iran-Backed Narcotraffickers

The Hashemite kingdom carried out rare airstrikes in May 2023 targeting a prominent kingpin and an Iran-backed drug facility in Syria’s Daraa province. Jordan took military action against narcotics targets in Syria again in August 2023, December 2023, and January 2024. The December 2023 strikes followed a series of clashes between armed smugglers and Jordanian forces at the Jordan-Syria border that left one Jordanian officer dead.

Jordan’s narco-war cannot be separated from Iran’s broader regional offensive. As early as 2022, Jordan’s King Abdullah told the press that the kingdom faces “regular attacks on its borders by militias linked to Iran.” In 2023, local Syrian media reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps helped establish a captagon factory in eastern Syria, allegedly under Hezbollah’s supervision. Hamas terrorists were also reportedly high on captagon when they carried out their October 7 massacre.

U.S. Policymakers Should Pause Before Engaging With Syria’s New Leaders

Shibani is not the first official in Syria’s interim government who pledged to crack down on homegrown narcotrafficking. After reaching Damascus on December 8, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, previously known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, declared that Syria had become “the world’s leading source of captagon” but was “being purified by the grace of God almighty.” Washington should nevertheless proceed with caution. Whether Syria’s new leaders follow through on their promises to shut down the captagon trade is one of many issues Washington should address before engaging them as serious partners.

Natalie Ecanow is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Natalie and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Natalie on X @NatalieEcanow. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on foreign policy and national security.