Assad's fall upends the Middle East's largest drug empire

Captagon helped sustain the Syrian regime, and fueled war and addiction across the region

- Sune Engel Rasmussen

The fall of Syria's Bashar al-Assad overturned the most profitable drug-smuggling network in the Middle East, exposing the former regime's role in manufacturing and trafficking pills that fueled war and social crises across the region.

Captagon, a methamphetamine-like drug that has been produced for years in Syrian labs, helped the Assad regime amass huge wealth and offset the impact of punishing international sanctions, while also allowing allies such as Lebanon's Hezbollah militia to profit from its trade.

Days after they ousted Assad in a lightning offensive last week, rebels circulated videos from industrial-scale manufacturing and trafficking facilities inside government air bases and other sites affiliated with former top regime officials.

Among the locations where rebels discovered the alleged captagon factories and storage facilities were the Mazzeh air base in Damascus, a car-trading company in the Assad family's hometown of Latakia and a former potato-chips factory in Douma near the capital believed to be affiliated with the ex-president's brother.

Footage by rebels and by journalists who filmed the sites at their invitation, including Reuters and Britain's Channel 4 News, showed thousands of captagon pills hidden in fake fruit, ceramic mosaics and electrical equipment.

They have said they destroyed at least some of the stored captagon.

Used by everyone from taxi drivers and students working late hours to militia fighters seeking courage, Syrian-produced captagon helped drive a demand for drugs across the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia, and became a source of international tension between Syria and its neighbors.

The disclosures provide evidence of what had long been alleged: that the Assad regime was the driving force behind an estimated $10 billion annual global trade in captagon, which in recent years has become the drug of choice across the Middle East.