Nearly a million captagon pills went up in smoke. The new Syrian authorities set fire to large quantities of narcotics on Wednesday, December 25, including a million captagon pills, an amphetamine produced on an industrial scale under Bashar al-Assad, two members of the security forces.
In Damascus, in the courtyard of former security offices of the old power, the forces of the new authorities sprayed fuel then set fire to the stocks of cannabis, boxes of Tramadol and around fifty small bags containing captagon pills , according to an AFP videographer. “We found a large quantity of captagon, around a million pills,” a member of these forces told AFP, introducing himself by his first name Osama, his face hooded, dressed in the khaki uniform of “the Public Safety Administration.”
On December 8, a coalition of rebels led by the radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir el-Sham (HTC) entered Damascus and announced the overthrow of power, after a dazzling offensive which allowed it to seize a large part of the country in eleven days. Abandoned by his Iranian and Russian allies, Bashar al-Assad, who ruled Syria with an iron fist for twenty-four years, fled to Moscow, marking the end of more than fifty years of unchallenged rule by the Assad clan. .
Bashar al-Assad’s rule was known for producing captagon, an amphetamine derived from a drug believed to treat narcolepsy or attention deficit disorder, transforming his country into a narco-state and flooding markets in the Middle East. , a real scourge spilling into neighboring Iraq or into Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia. Several Syrian officials have been hit by American sanctions, suspected by Washington of being involved in this drug trafficking.
“Protect Syrian society”
In recent days, in hangars or military bases, the coalition of Islamist armed groups has discovered small bags containing captagon pills by the hundreds. Very often, the narcotics are then set on fire by fighters from HTC, the leader of the Islamist groups. On Wednesday, the destruction of drugs took place in the formerly cordoned off “security sector” of Damascus, in the Kafar Soussé district.
“The security forces of the new Syrian government discovered a warehouse of narcotics during inspections of the security area,” another member of these forces, giving his name as Hamza, told AFP. The destruction of stocks – “alcohol, Indian hemp, captagon pills and packets of hashish” – is being done to “protect Syrian society” and “cut off the smuggling routes operated by the Assad family’s companies”, he said. he clarified, in allusion to the industrial scale drug trafficking of the old regime. “This is not the first initiative of its kind – security services have found other warehouses […] and drug manufacturing sites and destroyed them,” he said. An AFP investigation found that Captagon has turned Syria into a narco-state with an illegal industry worth more than $10 billion (or approximately 9.6 billion euros).