Inside the drug factory Plant produced Captagon pills that enriched regime

It was no secret: everyone seemed to know where it was. When asked for directions, the coffee vendor pointed up the hill.

- William Christou

"The Captagon factory? Straight ahead." On the outskirts of Damascus, just a 20-minute drive from the centre of the Syrian capital, lay a sprawling industrial complex.

Professed to be a soap factory, its products were anything but clean.

Rebels had broken into the complex as they pushed towards the capital city and found millions of Captagon pills and industrial quantities of precursor chemicals.

They had found plastic fruits that, when broken open, would reveal hundreds of tiny pills, along with fake copper coils stuffed with the narcotic and plasterboard with sheets of Captagon stashed inside.

For years, neighbouring states accused Bashar al-Assad's regime of being behind the world's largest Captagon production and export operation a claim it denied.

Jordan and the Gulf states begged the Assad regime to stop sending the drug over its borders, but the flow continued unhindered.